


Have at Least One Totally Epic Love

by Uncle Asad (Uncle_Asad)



Category: Legacies (TV 2018)
Genre: Additional spoilers through s03e04 because great minds think alike or plot turns are predictable?, Blood and Violence, Character Death, F/F, F/M, Hosie, I have no idea what I’m doing, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Spoilers through s02e13, The Handon part is almost entirely in the past though it’s still prominent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:55:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22859608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Uncle_Asad/pseuds/Uncle%20Asad
Summary: “Make art. Use your voice. Have adventures. And have at least one totally epic love. And be every bit of yourself, because the very best of me is in you.” —Hayley Marshall-Kenner“When my mother told me to have at least one totally epic love, what she didn’t mention, and what I was too young then to realize on my own, was that such loves don’t always have happy endings.” —Hope Mikaelson
Relationships: Hope Mikaelson/Josie Saltzman, Landon Kirby/Hope Mikaelson
Comments: 42
Kudos: 169





	1. Looking Back

**Author's Note:**

> This is, or will be, a Hosie fic. I had an idea of a scenario that would allow me to honor the Hope/Landon connection and romance that I was completely on board with in _The Originals_ s5e12 and the first ~30 minutes of _Legacies_ s1e01, while allowing it to run its “teen first love” course in a way that subsequent episodes have been struggling to prevent in a manner that is frustratingly obvious (at least to me). That love was real and true and maybe even epic in those ~75 minutes, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be forever or endgame.
> 
> This first chapter is more of a teaser/prologue to get us up to “the present” before we truly break with canon following s2e13.
> 
> (As an aside, after all the ranting The Necromancer does about being **The** Necromancer, I can’t believe his tag here is “Necromancer” :-P Poor guy.)

Chapter 1: Looking Back

Landon Kirby was my first love, the first person, the first boy I _loved_. He was more than just a crush, although he was that, too: who wouldn’t crush on a brooding, dark-haired townie who memorized your milkshake order and looked at you like you were the sun that rose and set upon his days? Who danced with you in the square under the fireworks of a late spring Mystic Falls festival, while you harbored an ancient, evil magic that was eating you up?

Once Dr Saltzman and I rescued Landon’s foster brother, Rafael, from an exorcism gone bad a year later and Landon tagged along back to Mystic Falls and the Salvatore School, we reconnected over our lack of connection, our outsider status, and our loss, and that crush began to mature. I cared about Landon, despite his entanglement in the theft of mystical artifacts and the raft of monsters that began to plague the school. Rescuing him, helping him find his mother, saving him from his father and brother, all of our adventures together deepened my feelings into proper, if still young, and maybe reckless, love. Which culminated in my knocking him unconscious and jumping into the Malivore pit with Clarke to save the world…or so I’d thought.

The road back from Malivore was just as rough and plagued with ankle-twisting stones as the road that took us to that pit in Fort Valley. Landon, newly phoenix-ed, spent the summer killing himself for flashes of me, forgotten, in his memories at death, and then got together with my best friend, the brilliant, brave, talented and beautiful witch Josie Saltzman. I think what drew them together, among all the other pain and loneliness they were going through that summer, was their connection to me; they both sensed something was missing in their lives, they knew whatever it was was the same thing for both of them, and bridged the gap, however awkwardly, by dating, each almost-but-not-quite filling the missing hole in the other.

By the time I escaped Malivore and returned to Mystic Falls, Landon and Josie were firmly ensconced as the Salvatore School power couple, much to the dismay of a coven of jealous witches—and perhaps only the chagrin of Josie’s twin sister (“fraternal, obvs”) Lizzie; after all, she was working hard to be a better person. When the truth did finally come out, after Josie performed a bad-ass ancient Japanese black magic purge spell she’d reverse-engineered with my Aunt Freya’s help, things exploded. Even before, things had been tense as Josie began to resent Landon’s strange interest in me, but then, with SimuLandon running around proclaiming his undying love for me while actual Landon squirmed in discomfort and tried to assuage Josie with platitudes about his deep and complex inner self, it ramped the awkwardness between the three of us up to eleven. And then, when things got too difficult, he took a page from his foster-kid experience and left. When your whole life has been spent being sent away whenever the people who are _supposed_ to care for you find you to be too much of an inconvenience in their lives, I understand how his first instinct was to run. My first instinct was to jump into the Malivore pit and leave everyone behind. Apples and oranges, maybe, but I get it.

Josie and I reconciled, or started to, but then Christmas rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from Landon, so while I fought an excess of Christmas cheer suffocating the school, I sent Lizzie off to check on Landon, lest the surplus of cheer turn out to be a distraction designed to keep us busy while something horrible happened to him. Turns out the time away had allowed Landon to sort out his thoughts and figure out how to do a reasonable facsimile of the right thing; he stopped me at front porch while running upstairs to (officially) break up with Josie. While he was kissing me under mistletoe and snowflakes, Josie was upstairs in her room, two mystical falls emanating from her shattered visage.

That was not our finest moment—not Landon’s, not mine, not ours as a couple. You know the old saying about karma, right? It’s a witch. Which witch, though, that’s the question. The easy answer is to say Alyssa Chang, who had it out for me, for the Saltzmans, hell, for everyone. But she wasn’t the reason that things between Landon and me felt out-of-sync. Not in any large or overly noticeable way, but just enough that there was this nagging little grain of sand under my proverbial heel. Looking back, I probably should have figured it out, but I was too swamped by breaking swells of emotions—love for Landon, and the desire to keep him safe; anger at Alyssa and her machinations; urgent desperation to rescue the Saltzmans from the prison world before something horrible happened to them at the hands of the psychotic Kai Parker or the Mora Miserium. When faced with an impossible choice, save the Saltzmans from death in the destruction of the prison world or save Landon from certain death at the point of a mystical, phoenix-killing golden arrow, I chose the Saltzmans. Landon told me afterwards that if he had had to make the choice between the Saltzmans and me, he would have chosen me.

§

And now…well, maybe it’s too late for all of us now.

When my mother told me to have at least one totally epic love, what she didn’t mention, and what I was too young then to realize on my own, was that such loves don’t always have happy endings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So…this is technically the first fanfic I have ever written (dunno if a bad couple-page _War and Remembrance_ continuation in middle school counts?) and definitely my first here…and the first piece of fiction I’ve written in two decades? Please bear with me; I’m **rusty**.
> 
> Also, I have an idea where I want this to go next, but, to be completely honest, I don’t know if I have the wherewithal to actually write it. This idea came to me while eating breakfast and it stuck with me all day, so I sat down to bang out the first part, and here we are. But I have a real problem with starting projects and never finishing them, so you are hereby forewarned.
> 
> Um…I hope you like it anyway?


	2. Reflections on a Simpler Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The bad news: another chapter of looking backwards and recapitulation of what we (mostly) already know. And it ran way longer than I had planned, so it’s only reflections again.
> 
> The good news: I wrote another chapter! And it’s the last chapter of catch-up, there are some delightful (I hope!) morsels of extra-canon events to make it interesting, and I was more awake while editing, so Hope has _fewer_ thoughts that seem like they were influenced by Faulkner, Joyce, or Woolf!

Chapter 2: Reflections on a Simpler Time

When my mother told me to have at least one totally epic love, what she didn’t mention, and what I was too young then to realize on my own, was that such loves don’t always have happy endings.

I really should have figured it out, though. After all, her epic love was with my Uncle Elijah, and that…to say that it ended disastrously would be the understatement of the millennium. I shudder, tear up, and want to run away every time I think about it, before shaking things off and remembering that she’s at peace, together with Jackson, and she forgave me. And maybe, just maybe, she’s getting that dance with Uncle Elijah in the great hereafter, epic loves requited.

My father’s epic love…well, when you lived a thousand years, there’s room for more than one. Surprisingly, there was only one, one so epic it still echoes through the world of the living today. I’m talking about the epic love between my father, the sweet and fearsome Klaus Mikaelson, and Caroline Forbes, Josie and Lizzie Saltzman’s birth mother. Our lives have all been entangled in epic love since before the three of us were even born. My father loved Caroline in a way he loved no other, not even Cami. She was everything he ever wanted, though ultimately could never have; she could go toe-to-toe with my dad in strength and in sweetness.

After my dad sacrificed himself to rid me and the world of the Hollow, Caroline was one of the few happy pieces of him I had left. If Alaric was the closest thing I had to a father, Caroline was the closest thing I had _to_ my father. As she travelled the world to find a solution to the Merge, the twins felt her absence far more crushingly than I did, so I never said anything, but it weighed upon me immensely, too. I was not about to say anything that could be interpreted as diminishing their pain, though—I would never hear the end of it from Lizzie if I did—so I did what we Mikaelsons do best, buried my sense of loss under a stoic face and deflected with other things.

So, yeah, epic love: echoing throughout eternity, entangling us, sometimes strangling us, and never assured of a happy ending.

§

When I think about Josie and Lizzie, I wonder if the universe has a sense of humor—a bitter, Mikaelsonesque sense of humor. How is it that one twin came out a spitting image of her bio-mom (as they call Alaric’s fiancée, Jo Laughlin, murdered by her psychotic twin brother on her wedding day while pregnant with the twins) and the other a spitting image of her birth mom? I sometimes wonder what it’s like for Alaric, er, Dr Saltzman, to look at them and see reflections of the love of his life and of the woman who bore and raised his children, and know he got neither. How does he live with that reminder, day after day, for nearly two decades now, and still get up in the morning? (Snarky Mikaelson answer to that question: the crystal container full of amber liquid omnipresent at his desk.) There’s another epic love story for you…epic sadness.

I like to think that Caroline’s own epic love story was with my father, though others argue it was her late husband of only half a day, Stefan Salvatore; either way, she didn’t get a happy ending from her epic love, either.

With all the prominent examples in my life, I really should have figured out that epic loves don’t necessarily mean happy endings.

§

I’ve known Josie and Lizzie since my mother first brought me to the Salvatore School at age 7. We became fast friends, as very young witches whose lives have already been unknowingly entangled for years do. And then the universe’s sense of humor came into play. Perhaps to balance the scales, we began to grow apart as we grew up. It wouldn’t be right for three cosmic loopholes, children born from situations that were never supposed to be possible, to all be happy and, worse, friends, would it? The harder I tried to hide the fact I was a Mikaelson, who had been exposed (from birth!) to all of the trauma that comes with that name, the more I started to become one. I was moody and withdrawn, along with a healthy dose of teenage hormones to further upset things.

Josie and Lizzie grew into gorgeous young women, spitting images of their mother(s) in appearances, intelligences, and temperaments. Lizzie became the queen bee of the Salvatore School, headmaster’s daughter, the brightest star with an ego to match…and brilliant, friendly Josie somehow atrophied into Lizzie’s appendage, relegated to an “and” that followed “Lizzie” on everyone’s tongue. Worse, though unbeknownst to almost everyone at the time, Lizzie soon began experiencing the genetic insanity that comes from centuries of murdering your twin—the Habsburgs had nothing on the Gemini, and there’s no doubt they gave the Targaryens a run for their money on that front, too. It took a while before I understood that Josie was sacrificing herself, her life, and her happiness to keep Lizzie upright, even though I didn’t know the half of it. Once I did grasp the (surface-level-only) reasons behind Josie’s sudden change, there wasn’t anything I could do; Josie had made her choice, and I had to respect that. After all, _they_ were sisters, twins with a special bond. I was an outsider, lying about who I really was, and I resigned myself to our friendship becoming another piece of my past.

Still, the first time Josie siphoned from me to perform a spell in class—I was 14, she was 13—it felt like the universe had just opened up a doorway that would explain all its mysteries to me. And maybe introduce some new mysteries to me, too. Bathed in a warm red glow, her soft, gentle, tentative touch was captivating; for a moment, I almost forgot the words to the spell we were performing. I then made the mistake of glancing over at her eyes, which had become deep brown pools of wonder; was it possible we were experiencing the same thing, I remember pondering at the time? (Spoiler alert from the future: we were.) For a brief period of time, we were back to being close friends like when we were kids. Years later I learned we were crushing on each other at the same time; if just _one_ thing had gone differently, I feel like maybe it could have been epic.

Instead, Josie panicked, afraid that Lizzie would find out and take me from her—at that time, whatever Josie wanted, Lizzie then decided she wanted, and she would get—which led to the infamous spring break fire incident. As Lizzie’s ire grew during the fallout from the fire, Josie became more desperate to keep her secret(s) from Lizzie and dug herself further and further into a hole. Word went around the school that I had outed Lizzie’s mental condition and had called her cruel, callous names (both part of Josie’s hole-digging, she confessed to us years later on a spring break road trip), and Lizzie seemed like she could have burned the entire school to the ground just to get me. I was now enemy number one, and there was a complete break between us. Every little innocuous thing fueled Lizzie’s resentment (and, if I’m being honest, my own), and it would take three years, a lot of chaos, a smattering of luck, and the unending efforts of their parents to dull the hatred pointing between us, before our very cold war experienced a thaw.

The arrival of Landon and the beginning of the Malivore threat upended the status quo. I convinced Josie, fresh from setting Penelope’s hair aflame, to help me perform a black magic locator spell to track Landon and the missing knife. It was tiny, but it was _something_. Today, I wonder whether I should have done that; perhaps we wouldn’t be in this situation if I hadn’t given Josie her first hit of black magic. I should have asked Penelope, or even Alyssa Chang, to help me instead. I wrestle with the guilt, the what-might-have-beens. Maybe Josie and I still would have become friends again some other way, without that dark locator spell. Perhaps. And if we hadn’t? Maybe giving up being friends with Josie would have been worth it if it prevented the world we have now…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Next, Josie and I shared a moment during a “detention” cleanup of downtown Mystic Falls. She was being punished for her role in the illicit football game victory, me for my recent black magic usages Dr Saltzman had ferreted out. That detention moment led to others, battling a gargoyle and a giant people-wearing spider. I gave her a necklace with a special talisman “to make quiet things heard” for her birthday and then led the charge to save her after she was buried alive the night of her Sweet Sixteen.

When I was trapped inside The Necromancer’s mind, Josie stayed up all night in Paris, astral projecting to my side and talking to me, guiding me back out before disappearing the very instant I awoke (I really hope she got an A on that exam!). Lizzie later told me she was this close to having to knock out her sister and sever the siphon connection; Josie insisted she was fully aware of the limits and that’s why she stopped before I could see her when I awoke. Still, Lizzie’s errands that morning consisted of visiting various disgusting locations (“I can’t believe a city as beautiful as Paris has vile and disgusting places like that!”) getting enough blood to allow Caroline to replenish her strength, also stopping at every bakery she passed to get enough chocolate croissants for her and Josie. (The things we do for the people we love, Lizzie!)

Later, Josie, Lizzie and I went with Dr Saltzman and some others from the school on the world’s worst spring break roadtrip, which led Josie to begin confessing her panicked actions three years before that severed the twins’ relationships with me. And, to top it all off, she revealed she had had a crush on me then! At that instant I swooned, barely managing to conceal my emotions from Lizzie, who undoubtedly would have hit me with whatever was at hand to keep “Mikaelson craziness” away from her twin. Lizzie didn’t exactly forgive me for everything that had transpired between us over the past few years, but I did get promoted all the way up to frenemy status.

Then, at the end of spring, we fought Triad together when they occupied the school, I saved Josie’s life with my blood, and, finally, I jumped into the Malivore pit to save Landon and all of them, to save the world.

You know what happened next, a summer and fall where the world went sideways, leaving Josie and I at odds when I returned and her with no memories of me.

Later, when the oni possessed Lizzie, Josie vanquished it by siphoning the ancient Japanese black magic purge spell from the samurai’s katana and blasting Lizzie with it, inadvertently giving Lizzie her memories of me back. That was a weird time, with Lizzie the only person in the world who remembered me, but it allowed us to become friends. We still have a bit of a sharp edge to our friendship, but it was wonderful to have that piece of my mostly-happy childhood revived. And while Lizzie would not be captaining the good ship Hosie any time soon, she did help rebuild the connection between Josie and me after Josie restored everyone’s memories (did I mention Josie was bad-ass?). Josie’s and my heartbreak aside, after Landon left with Rafael in the fall, the twins and I were in such a good place, the best we’d been since we were children.

Landon’s Christmas choice—and my acceptance of it—destroyed that, but thankfully only temporarily. The twins and I were working through it when Alyssa banished the Saltzmans to the prison world, and once Josie brought them all back, everything between us seemed good. Our embrace after their safe return was tight and heartfelt (and nearly made me forget about what Kai had set in motion for Landon). Josie and I ran to check on Landon together; thankfully, he was safe, and Mr Williams was going to make a complete recovery, too. Dr Saltzman even managed to rid us of Kai for good that evening. We all went to bed that night feeling so light, filled with happiness and contentment.

§

Even with all of the chaos, that was a simpler time. A happier time for all of us. I should have known better.

I awoke the next morning with my insides in an epic knot, followed by a rapid, heavy pounding on my bedroom door. Lizzie awoke that morning alone in bed, vomiting black bile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for persevering all the way through the setup; I hope you enjoyed it. The action begins in earnest in the next chapter (which I’ve started writing and have mostly sketched out), and I have rough sketches for at least one more chapter after that one, too, depending on how the writing weaves its way.
> 
> But, uh, be warned…it’s getting real, fast, as Hope alluded to in a couple of places in this chapter.


	3. Love in the Morning of Dark Cholera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are the first one and a half scenes of what I had envisioned of chapter 3(!), beginning the morning after s2e13. Apparently this is going to be a longer and more involved (or at least more detailed) story than I originally anticipated.

Chapter 3: Love in the Morning of Dark Cholera

By the time she realized her sister not only wasn’t in bed with her but also wasn’t in their room at all, Lizzie wasn’t just vomiting black bile but was also oozing black blood from every other outlet in her body. Her eyes, her ears, her nose…it was even coming out from underneath her fingernails. She knew at that moment Josie wasn’t on campus anymore and that her twin was in grave danger. I’m sure she wanted to get her father, but I was a lot closer, just down the hall and around the corner, so Lizzie pulled herself out of bed and ran as fast as she could in that condition, leaving a trail of black from their room to mine.

I had just awoken with my insides in an epic knot, and I knew instantly that something was terribly, seriously wrong. It was Josie, I was sure of it. I’d barely moved my head to catch the time on the clock—just after 6 AM—when I heard rapid, heavy pounding on my bedroom door. There was some sort of gurgling sound, too, and an overpowering stench of rancid bile and blood. I leaped from bed, grabbed the closest object—a paintbrush was not going to do me much good against, well, anything, but that’s what happens when I have to hide everything else from an angry roommate—and was at the door in an instant. As I opened it, I got a glance of something that looked a little bit like Lizzie, spewing black liquids, as it fell into me, knocking us both to the floor.

It took me a moment to catch my breath and wipe disgusting black liquids from my eyes, but when I did so, I saw that it was indeed Lizzie that had been knocking on my door and had tumbled into me. “Lizzie! What happened?” I urgently inquired as I began to sit us up. “And…where’s Josie?”

Lizzie’s bleeding eyes were brimming with terror, and I was afraid that she would not be able to tell me anything. “Gughgublugh,” she gurgled in response, as unintelligible as I had feared. “Gujusie guhbumissblughing!” followed the first outburst, in an increasingly-panicked tone of gurgle, as the black bile continued to pour from her mouth onto my pajamas and bedroom floor. Between the twists in my stomach and that second attempt at words, I was certain that not only was Josie missing, but that she was in mortal danger.

“Hope!? Hope, are you OK!?” came the quiet but panicked voice of Landon, interrupting my fear-stricken thoughts and growing louder as he seemed to be sprinting down the hall to my room. What was he doing here at this time in the morning, I wondered? In a few seconds, his mop of black hair above a worried face was visible peering through my doorway…and there was a tray of breakfast in his hands. Apparently I was going to be gifted breakfast in bed this morning if the rest of this hadn’t happened. The trail of black fluids on the floor and walls leading to my open door must have been the source of his distress.

“Landon, I’m fine…but Lizzie’s not. Help us up,” I replied.

He sat the tray of breakfast down on my bed, then quickly moved to my side and extended his hands, one to me and one to Lizzie. “So much for breakfast in bed. For once, I’d like to have a romantic moment with my girlfriend without supernatural interference,” he sighed.

Luckily for him, Landon couldn’t see Lizzie’s face, because it had become a death stare underneath the blood and bile still coming from all of her openings. However, with his help, I managed to get to my feet and we pulled Lizzie mostly to hers, with me bearing most of her weight. “I’ve got Lizzie, thanks; go get Kaleb and MG and meet us in Dr Saltzman’s office ASAP,” I ordered (deciding that Raf was likely in no state to help us this soon after his rescue, at least not without more sleep—and, if I’m being completely honest, wanting to avoid even _more_ unhelpful awkwardness in a time of crisis).

“Are you sure? She looks like a handful….”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I cut him off, again witnessing the Saltzman death stare he was unable to see. “I know a spell that will help, so go, quickly.” Landon left, and I finally remembered to let go of the paintbrush I had been clutching for defense. “Can you stand on your own for just a second?” I asked Lizzie. She weakly nodded and let go of me, so I ran to the corner of my room, pulled back a rug, and pried up a loosened floorboard. Underneath the floor (I am a Mikaelson, after all; Auntie Bex would be proud) I had sequestered a couple of _very_ old grimoires, and I grabbed the one I was looking for. I ripped out a page and stuffed it in my back pocket, then hastily put everything back before rushing back to Lizzie’s side.

I put her arm around my neck and asked her if she could walk. Again she nodded weakly, so we headed through the door into the hall, locking the door behind me with a flick of my wrist. As we headed downstairs and towards her father’s office, I spoke again. “When I was looking for anything to help Josie with the black magic after effects stored in the Mora Miserium, I came across this spell in an old grimoire. It wasn’t any good for that, but I’m pretty sure it will cancel second-hand effects in a case like this.” Lizzie faintly smiled at the first good news she’d had since waking up alone this morning, before unleashing another spew of black bile. What I didn’t tell her was that the spell was from one of my great-aunt Dahlia’s grimoires. Aunt Freya would have a fit if she knew that I had it, much less was using a spell from it, but desperate times and all. Every little edge we could get was important in this battle with Malivore and its litany of forgotten monsters.

By this time we’d made it to Dr Saltzman’s office, and we burst into the room. The twins’ father was at his desk, his morning cup of coffee in hand, already immersed in some ancient tome. His head shot up as we entered, and we saw shock, then anger, then fear overtake his visage. The book fell to his desk and the coffee cup tumbled to the floor as he rushed over to us. “Lizzie!” he called out, “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Hope, what’s going on!?” His voice became increasingly frantic with every escaping word, once again having to live a parent’s worst nightmare. He helped me maneuver Lizzie onto the couch that faced his desk, and as he sat beside her, gently rubbing her back in an attempt to comfort or reassure her, I darted over to his desk. I opened the drawer that contained his “secret” stash of alcohol and picked up a bottle that was nearly empty. Say one thing for Dr Saltzman’s drinking habit, the odds were always good one could find an empty or nearly-empty bottle when needed. I poured the remainder out of the bottle and into a nearby plant, catching the horrified look on my surrogate father’s face.

I started to explain, “Lizzie knocked on my door like this just a few minutes ago. She hasn’t been able to say anything coherent yet, but I think we all know what it means…” I trailed off, not wanting to broach the subtext; one problem at a time this morning. “I found a spell in an old family grimoire that I think will help Lizzie,” I continued, placing the now-empty alcohol bottle in her hands and dropping the cap in her father’s empty hand. “Lizzie, when I start the spell, move the mouth of the bottle to your mouth. Dr Saltzman, when I finish, put the cap on it.” They nodded, and I fished the torn page from my back pocket and began to recite the spell. As I chanted, I noticed the bleeding under her finger- and toenails stopped, followed by the bleeding from her ears, while the bleeding from her eyes and nose seemed to diminish, and the vomiting had also lessened. As I continued to repeat the phrases, the bottle slowly began to fill with black fluids, and the remaining bleeding had ceased. After another round, Lizzie was no longer vomiting black bile, and the bottle had been filled. As I finished, I called out, “Alaric, now!” (eschewing formality for speed) and he quickly capped the bottle. Relieved, I rushed to envelop them in a heartfelt embrace.

As Dr Saltzman started to speak, Landon arrived with Kaleb and MG, the phoenix trying to catch his breath after being whisked to the office by his classmates at vamp speed. Kaleb and MG looked horrified by the scene; the couch and carpet, as well as all of our clothes, were saturated with the black fluids Lizzie had been oozing and spewing. If there was one silver lining, it was that the smell of the black blood had turned MG’s face in revolt rather than triggering his potential ripper side.

§

With all eyes back on me, I finally managed to force out the sentence that I had been dreading, had been avoiding, since I woke up with my stomach in a massive knot this morning: “Josie is missing and something terrible is happening to her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Events speed up from here (but so does the fear)…and we find out what has happened to Josie! I have the bulk of the rest of the next chapter ( _aka_ the other scenes formerly envisioned as part of chapter 3) written already, so hopefully the wait won’t be as long.
> 
> I hope you’re enjoying the suspense (and I hope the payoff will be worth it when we get there). Thanks to everyone who has left kudos or commented; your support is a warm fire during these cold winter days.


	4. The Best Revenge

Chapter 4: The Best Revenge

“Josie is missing and something terrible is happening to her.”

“How do you know that, Hope?” inquired Landon. Of course it would be Landon to obliviously ask the obvious.

“I woke up with a terrible feeling in my stomach…and did you _see_ Lizzie?!” I answered, my voice filling with exasperation.

Lizzie chimed in, “Jo and I went to sleep in my bed last night, twin cuddles after our epically bad day.” She paused, no doubt thinking of Sebastian, who, despite his drugging her wine with his blood, had shown his true love for her by saving her life, her father’s life, and her now-missing twin sister’s life during their escape from the collapsing prison world. “I woke up this morning, alone in our room, vomiting this black sludge and oozing black blood from everywhere else. You do the math,” she continued, adding a biting tone to the end and pointing from the bottle to the black stains on the carpet, couch, and our clothes.

“I’m certain that Lizzie’s experience with the black fluids is related to Josie and black magic…she’s not performing black magic, because this is different…but maybe someone is performing black magic _on her_?” I added.

“No matter what it is, we need to find Josie,” chimed in MG.

“Agreed…we need some supplies for a locator spell, and some food and liquids for Lizzie,” I added. “Some Gatorade and yogurt, nothing fancy.” Lizzie pouted at me after I clarified her breakfast requirements.

“Kaleb, will you go to the cafeteria and get food and liquids? Some simple things for the rest of us, too, please. I’ll go get what we need for the locator spell,” remarked Dr Saltzman, and the two of them left, leaving Lizzie and I with a concerned MG and a lurking Landon.

§

“I promise you, Lizzie, we’ll get Josie back, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

“I believe you, Hope, but you know that she’ll never forgive you if that is indeed the last thing you ever do. She might not even forgive _me_ if I let you…. I may not be the captain of…MG, what is you call them again? ‘The Good Ship Hokey…’”

“Hosie, Lizzie, _Hosie_ ,” MG interrupted. “Hope plus Josie is _Hosie_. How many times do I have to explain how it works? You take the first part of one name and…”

“Whatever,” Lizzie brusquely returned the interruption, then turned back to me. “I may not be the captain of ‘The Good Ship Hosie,’ but I know how my twin sister feels about you, Hope. That crush she had on you when she was 13 never completely went away, and it’s been back with a vengeance this past year. And I’m not blind, either; I see the way you look at her, the way you are when the two of you are together. You, wild and vicious Hope freaking Mikaelson, are never more of a teddy bear than when you and Jo are hanging out together. …Ow! What was that for, Mikaelson?”

I had just playfully punched Lizzie in the biceps. “For calling me ‘wild and vicious’ and ‘a teddy bear’! I’m neither of those things.”

“Hey MG,” Lizzie called out, already moving on to something else as usual, though in this case it was perhaps to take her mind off of her twin. “What cute name did you come up with for Sebastian and me? ‘Liztian?’ Please tell me it wasn’t ‘Sebastizzie,’ because I totally deserve to be the first name. …Well?”

MG groaned, because he knew this was not going to end well for him. “Trainwreck,” he muttered under his breath, then spoke up, “There wasn’t one, because I didn’t ship the two of yo…ouch!”

Lizzie, with a pout on her face, had just slugged MG in _his_ biceps!

What is it they say about us not being able to see something right in front of our own face? That was Lizzie when it came to MG, for sure. And if it was true there…maybe she was right about Josie and me, too?

“OK, I think we have everything we need,” interjected Emma, who had returned with Dr Saltzman and several handfuls of magical supplies, mercifully interrupting our emotional spelunking and silliness, and also causing Landon to focus on something other than frowning in my direction, which he had been doing for most of Lizzie’s monologue.

Kaleb followed them in with Alyssa Chang, Jade, and Wendy, each carrying some food and drink. “Emma was bringing Alyssa, Jade, and Wendy in for an early breakfast when I ran into her,” Alaric explained. “I have a feeling we’re going to need some extra hands with this locator spell.”

Kaleb gave Lizzie her Gatorade and yogurt, while the other three distributed other food and beverage items to the rest of us. Jade and Wendy approached Lizzie and told the witch how sorry they were about the situation, and even Alyssa looked like she was genuinely concerned despite her longstanding dislike of the Saltzmans.

Emma and I tried a locator spell using a picture that Josie had drawn for her father as a child, which Dr Saltzman kept on his desk. We were getting nothing. “Something is cloaking Josie from us,” Emma announced. “We are going to need to use Lizzie’s twin connection to anchor the spell,” she continued. “Wendy, Alyssa, can you join us?”

Lizzie, still seated on the couch, carefully sliced her palm and held Josie’s drawing while Emma, Alyssa, Wendy and I linked hands and formed a circle around her. This time we were getting something, but it was still indistinct. Lizzie reached one hand out to me and grasped my arm, while she extended the other to Jade, who had been watching from close by. Lizzie then started siphoning from the vampire who had helped save her life in the prison world and had developed a strange connection with her twin. With this added boost of power and connection, the spell finally was effective, pointing us to the cemetery out in the woods. Sigh. Nothing good _ever_ happens there.

“Super squad, gear up and meet back here in 5,” I ordered. Kaleb and MG shot out of the office at vamp speed. As I saw Dr Saltzman eyeing his hidden weapons cabinet, I continued, “Dr Saltzman, you need to stay here with Lizzie and keep an eye on the school. We don’t know who is doing this, what they might have planned, or even if Josie is just a distraction for something else. We need more than one adult here if anything happens, and with Dorian in the hospital and Caroline still in Europe, that’s you and Emma.” With a resigned look, Dr Saltzman nodded; he knew I was right.

“Like hell I’m staying here during the rescue of my twin, Hope,” interjected Lizzie. “Besides, I feel fine now that you got that gunk out of me and I’ve had some breakfast.” (And maybe a little siphoning of Jade, I thought.) “And what if there’s a barrier or some other spell that needs siphoning? I’m coming, and that’s that,” the feisty blonde witch concluded.

Unlike with Dr Saltzman, this was a fight I knew I _wasn’t_ going to win, and the look of defeat on her father’s face indicated he knew that, too. “OK, Lizzie,” I sighed and took her hand, preparing to walk back to our dorm rooms and change out of our disgusting pajamas. At least Landon wasn’t insisting he was coming, too; perhaps he really was going to leave the superhero/fighting part to me.

“I’m coming, too,” piped up, of all people, Alyssa Chang, causing all of our jaws to drop.

“Err…what?” replied Dr Saltzman and Lizzie in unison.

“It’s fine, she can come,” I answered with a half-sigh, not entirely sure of myself.

“Do you trust her?” inquired our beaten-down headmaster.

“Not completely, but I also know what to expect. And in case you hadn’t noticed, the super squad is short a couple of bad-ass witches today….”

“Besides, I’ve decided the best revenge is all of you having to be grateful to me for saving Josie,” Alyssa added, like a bizarre cherry on top of this sundae of an argument….

§

We were walking through the forest on our way to the cemetery, MG out ahead with his unwanted crush, Alyssa, following his every move. Lizzie and I were walking side-by-side in the middle, and Kaleb brought up the rear. All we could hear were the sounds of our own footsteps…and the fears and doubts echoing through our heads.

“Lizzie, I’m so sorry; this is all my fault,” I said, finally breaking the silence between us.

“What do you mean, Hope?” Lizzie inquired.

“Josie being kidnapped, Josie being consumed by black magic, all of it; it’s all my fault, Lizzie. I was the one who introduced her to black magic; the night Landon disappeared with the knife, we did a black magic locator spell to find him….”

“If you’d said that last year, I would have agreed with you 100%. But I’m trying to be a better person, and that means not taking the easy way out and blaming you for everything bad that happens,” she said with a slight chuckle. “Josie set Penelope on fire that same night. That’s not something that a witch who isn’t flirting with the lines does. Vardemus would likely have found a way to seduce her into black magic even if she hadn’t performed that spell with you….”

“If I hadn’t jumped into the pit, I would have been here to intervene and stop Vardemus’s swaying her…and, she wouldn’t have been dating Landon nor been angry about the residual elements of our connections that kept bubbling to the surface without the memories to make sense of them; that jealousy played right into Vardemus’s hands, too.”

“Hope, you can’t keep doing this, regretting or second-guessing every single choice you’ve made. None of what’s happened to Jo and to me is your fault. Darkness is our birthright, just like it is yours. We’re Gemini; for thousands of years, we’ve murdered our twin. Our father is a self-destructive alcoholic vampire hunter whose coping mechanism has, for decades, been day-drinking with Uncle Damon, who was for most of that time one of the most violent vampires in Mystic Falls. At least as long as your family wasn’t around,” she chuckled again, before continuing, “And I love my mother, but she became a vampire when she was a bit of a self-absorbed high school pageant queen—and, no, the irony of who I have become is not lost on me. No matter where we turn, there’s darkness in our blood, Hope. It’s not Mikaelson-level darkness, but it may be the next worst thing. There’s no reason to think that things would have played out any differently in the grand scheme of things if you hadn’t done that spell with Jo, or jumped into the pit, or taken the hobbit back at Christmas, or whatever else you’re beating yourself up over today. Focus on what’s next, not what’s past. Promise me, Hope?” she said as she reached over to gently grasp my arm.

“OK, Lizzie, I promise…if only because you’ve worn me down with your monologues today,” I replied with a chuckle. “We should be quiet now and pay attention; we’re getting close to the cemetery.” What Lizzie hadn’t told me was that she was using that monologue to distract herself from the way she was starting to feel weak as a result of what was happening to Josie.

A few more minutes of walking in the eerily-quiet forest and the Super Squad arrived at the cemetery. We were on edge, waiting to be jumped by some monster or a group of vampires or even a band of ninjas…but nothing. That made it all the more creepy.

Suddenly, I saw the vampires’ ears twitch, as though they had picked up a sound. We three witches followed them, spells ready on the tips of our tongues. Then I heard it, too, a very faint crying, a quiet thing now being heard. We quickened our pace towards a large mausoleum, eyes constantly sweeping the forest for potential enemies. The door was open, so we went inside…but we were not prepared for what we saw next.

In the center of the main room, we saw a very pale Josie with jet black hair, softly weeping, chained spread-eagle across a large red pentagram drawn on the floor in blood. She was still in her pajamas, but the arms and legs had been mostly removed, as had the majority of the fabric around her midriff. A dozen or more transparent tubes ran from her to a clear, globe-like vessel on a stand nearby. The vessel and the tubes were empty, though we could tell that they had once had blood in them. The worst part, though, was that the tubes were attached to Josie’s body with leeches. If it hadn’t been Josie, I might have marveled at this witch-steampunk device, but that was my best friend attached to the demented contraption, looking very much like she had been drained of nearly all of her blood.

“Jo!” Lizzie cried, her voice wobbly and full of shock. MG had already arrived at Josie’s side with vamp speed, with Lizzie and I sprinting the short distance right after. Josie’s head weakly raised an inch or so from where it was resting on the ground, making eye contact with Lizzie and me. For the briefest of moments, a flicker of relief replaced the abject fear in her eyes.

“Josie, we’re going to get you out of here,” I added fiercely. MG grabbed the chain pulling her right arm, but he was unable to budge it from the ground. Kaleb sped over to join him, but together they were no more effective. I tried a breaking spell on the chain holding her left arm, and it seemed to bounce off the chain and shatter a stone in the wall instead. The chains were spelled.

While Kaleb and MG moved to take up defensive positions around us, Lizzie grabbed each chain in turn and began to siphon, speaking softly to Josie as she did. After she had siphoned them all, she joined hands with Alyssa and me and the three of us repeated the chain-breaking spell, severing the chains from the floor and opening the manacles, finally freeing each of Josie’s wrists and ankles one by one. Lizzie, now very woozy from her twin bond reflecting Josie’s drained state and from the amount of magic required to break the chains once she had de-spelled them, dropped to her knees next to her sister, and Josie weakly hugged her.

I wanted to pull Josie up and hug her tightly in my arms, too, and find out exactly what had happened here, had happened to her, but I was still wary of how empty the forest and cemetery had been, and I was too deep in warrior mode to turn it off. Still, I knelt next to Lizzie as Josie’s arms fell away from her sister’s neck, breaking their twin hug.

Josie then faintly mumbled a word that sent chills down our spines: “Malivore.”

In shock, the next thing I heard, also faintly, was a wicked laugh that immediately brought me into a waking nightmare. It wasn’t…it couldn’t…it’s not possible…The Necromancer!?

I heard the voice again, much louder this time, and my heart sunk as I realized it was indeed the evil sorcerer who had trapped me in his mind, raised the twins’ mother from the dead and made her bury Josie alive, and tormented Raf with his dead girlfriend in order to steal that damned knife that started everything.

“The best revenge is using the very thing that once held me captive to destroy all of those meddling schoolchildren. Then the world will once again tremble at the name ‘The Necromancer!’ Hahahaha!”

With a sense of urgency and impending doom, I called to MG and Kaleb to help us get the drained Josie and exhausted Lizzie to their feet. Together, the four of us helped the twins stumble out of the place that had been torture chamber to Josie for the past half-day.

As soon as we exited, I caught sight of a huge, tan, vaguely-clay-like monster headed towards us. “MG, Kaleb, get the twins back to school and have Emma put barrier spells up. We’ll hold off the monster,” I breathlessly ordered, glancing at Alyssa, who nodded; she would keep her promise. MG picked up Josie (best friend trumps crush in a time of danger, I guess) and Kaleb did the same to Lizzie, and the two of them disappeared at vamp speed into the forest in the direction of the Salvatore School.

Unfortunately, in the time it took for them to depart, the monster had grabbed a large granite boulder, one of many scattered throughout the forests in this part of the country, and raised it above his head. Before Alyssa or I could do anything, he hurled it at us. Thankfully, his aim was terrible and he missed us, but he did succeed in collapsing the entrance to the mausoleum around us. Alyssa was only knocked down and thrown in the direction of a small tomb nearby, but my legs were trapped by large pieces of stone from the mausoleum.

It took us a few moments to catch our breath and shake off the shock of the attack, but by then the creature had halved the distance between us. Alyssa scrambled to her feet, glanced over to see me trapped in the rubble, and then glanced back at the monster, which was steadily closing the distance. This clearly was Malivore, restored to his original form, and it was not looking good for us. At least Josie is safe now, I found myself thinking, distracting myself from the fear gripping my insides due the gravity of our situation. Even if I hadn’t been able to say good-bye to my best friend, she was going to be safe, and at that tiny moment, that was all that mattered.

Alyssa grabbed a stray shovel (no doubt left by someone planting flowers at a grave), slammed it into the ground near where a small eternal flame flickered by a tomb, and, I realized a moment later, burst a natural gas line. (Because only in Mystic Falls do they run natural gas to a cemetery!) She backed up as far as she could and waited. It only took a few seconds for Malivore to thud on top of Alyssa’s newly-created gas leak, and a fraction of another for her to utter “Incendia!” (We Salvatore witches really love our fire spells, don’t we?) The leaking gas erupted into a massive fireball, also creating a mini-earthquake rocking a several square-mile area (for once, the disaster-of-the-day in Mystic Falls would truthfully be a natural gas incident! I wish I could see the expression on Mayor Donovan’s face when Dr Saltzman tells him it really _was_ a natural gas explosion).

Unfortunately, a few seconds later, Malivore emerged from the conflagration unscathed, lumbering towards Alyssa who had barely managed to shield herself from the blast by crouching behind some debris from the boulder attack. “Alyssa! Run!” I screamed, even as I knew it was too late; the witch had nowhere to run. Malivore reached his giant hand down, grasping her head as if he were about to crush it.

With a last, quick glance in my direction, a smirk on her face masking the terror gripping her, and sarcasm dripping on her voice in a forced bravado, Alyssa called out to me, “I’ve changed my mind: the best revenge is saving your life and knowing that you and the Saltzmans will forever have to live with the truth that I was the one who saved their precious Hope. Now get out of here, Hope. Run!”

Alyssa raised her hand, as though she planned to strike Malivore, perhaps a spell on her lips to accompany it, and brought her fist down against his massive chest. Instead of, well, anything we might have expected to happen, her hand sunk into his body. She was being absorbed! That…that wasn’t supposed to be possible. Witches, werewolves, and vampires created Malivore to absorb _other_ supernatural creatures; they were supposed to be immune from it. Yet here was Alyssa Chang, a powerful young witch and first-day member of the Salvatore School Super Squad, slowly sinking into the giant monster’s body. “Run, Hope! Go!” she shouted once more, breaking my thoughts and shocking me back to reality.

“Alyssa!” I screamed, as she was already up to her shoulder in Malivore.

“Go!”

”I’m sorry,” I shouted back.

“Just go, Hope! Get out of here! …And tell MG I love him…” she yelled back, one last time, as Malivore began to suck her head and torso into him. I quickly brought a spell to my lips, shattering the stone that had trapped my legs. I scrambled to my feet and hurled the first spell that came to mind—the old black magic death spell—at Malivore. Nothing. It was completely ineffective. In that short amount of time, he had finished absorbing Alyssa; there was nothing left of the prickly witch but the horror imprinted on my brain from what I had just seen.

I turned to run, suddenly feeling Malivore’s breath on my neck. I was faster, but his much larger stride and sturdier footing in the forest almost entirely negated my advantage. Plus, his armspan meant he didn’t have to get as close to grab me. As I scrambled out of the cemetery and into the forest, headed back towards the Salvatore School campus, I knew I had only one chance, one shot at escaping. I grabbed the hem of my shirt, pulling it over my head as I ran and flinging it at Malivore’s head as I dodged a tree stump, hoping to buy even a precious second as he lumbered after me. (I’m pretty sure it took him even less time to wipe it off his face.) Next, I unclasped my bra and pulled it from my body, tossing it aside. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to remove any more of my clothing and still remain beyond Malivore’s reach; one simply cannot remove shoes and pants while running. I was just going to have to hope for the best.

I thought of my mom and my dad, the two wolves who had brought me into this crazy world. I remembered my first turn under the full moon in this very forest, Josie and Lizzie siphoning the Hollow from me as every bone in my body broke simultaneously. I remembered all the times I ran in the bayou with Aunt Keelin. I took a deep breath, landed one foot on a downed tree, and launched myself forward and high into the air, willing my body to turn as fast as supernaturally possible. I felt my shoes and socks fall away at the same time I began to feel the wind in my face and smell the verdant pine of the forest. Then, I felt my lupine legs sailing away from falling cloth just before my forepaws made contact with the ground. I had successfully turned in midair while partly clothed and managed not to get tangled up in anything, as well as landing firmly and then breaking into a run. I didn’t look back, but I could hear myself putting more distance between me and the end of the supernatural world with every leap I took, until I could no longer hear him at all when I reached the property line of the campus. I didn’t slow down, even though I was becoming breathless, because I knew every second mattered for the future. Only once I reached the barrier that Emma and the witches had thankfully erected around the inner core of campus did I stop—having sensed its presence a couple of strides in advance—and then quickly turned around and glanced back whence I had come.

I could still see treetops shaking in the forest in the middle distance, indicating that Malivore had not abandoned pursuit, but it seemed _maybe_ he wasn’t coming quite as fast now that he could no longer see me. I shifted back to human form, placed my palm to the barrier, and uttered a spell, briefly rendering the barrier porous to me. I stepped through, verified that the barrier had reformed, and pulled a few words of my grandmother’s to my tongue to reinforce it. Not that it would stop Malivore, but every little bit of added difficulty would help and would buy us precious time. I then dropped back to the ground, shifting again as I fell.

With that, I bounded towards the main building and through the halls to Dr Saltzman’s office, where I could smell that Kaleb and MG had taken Lizzie and Josie (because we never seem to use the infirmary; why do we even have one?). I crashed through the office door to see Dr Saltzman, Lizzie, and MG huddled around Josie, who was laying on the same black-stained couch as her sister had been just a few hours earlier when she was oozing black fluids. In another creepy parallelism, Josie was connected to several clear tubes again, this time putting blood back into her. (Seriously, why don’t we use the infirmary for stuff like this? Also, Dr Saltzman is going to need a visit from Stanley Steemer after today is over.) Still a great ball of white fur, I bounded over to Josie and gave her face a giant lick.

§

Josie barely moved her head, but her left hand shot out to my neck, grabbing a handful of fur. And then she started to siphon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, uh, that’s why I had to divide chapter 3; I think this is as long as the entire story so far!
> 
> I’m sorry that after all of that, we didn’t exactly find out what happened to Josie like I had promised in the previous end notes (at least not in the specific sense, though we did in the more general sense, and you might be able to infer some of the details). There was one more scene I had planned for this chapter, but I hadn’t written it yet and decided that this was a pretty good stopping point on its own. But that reveal is up next.
> 
> And Hope and Josie did finally get to see each other! Not for long, and in some scary situations, but there was a little Hosie moment, right? They’ll be side-by-side for pretty much the rest of the story.
> 
> What did you think about Alyssa?
> 
> The bad news is that there is _at least_ this same amount of story left, and though I have the major points outlined, I don’t have anything written yet. So hopefully this chapter ends in a happy-enough place to hold you over until I can come back with even more fireworks. Thanks again for reading and for all of your support.


	5. It Was a Bad Morning

Chapter 5: It Was a Bad Morning

Josie barely moved her head, but her left hand shot out to my neck, grabbing a handful of fur. And then she started to siphon.

§

Over the years, the twins had siphoned magic from me on many occasions; it came with the territory when you were friends with witches who were born without their own magic. They always tried to have some magical object with them from which they could siphon in an emergency, and Alaric and Caroline had carefully laced the campus with magic for them, but for more demanding spells and when they weren’t on campus, the twins would siphon from a friend. For a while, that friend was often me. Then everything fell apart, and it wasn’t. But over the past two years, sometimes grudgingly on one of our parts, it has often been me again as we’ve battled the monsters Malivore has unleashed upon us.

Now that we’re older, though, it’s different than when we were kids. Maybe the heightened senses now that I’ve awoken my werewolf side, too. With Josie, siphoning always felt intimate, no matter how mundane the spell she or we were going to perform. It never was that way with Lizzie (who siphoned from me more than she would care to admit given our frenemy status), but it was with Josie, always, even those times when both she and Lizzie were siphoning from me together. It felt like Josie and I had a deep, personal connection on a mystical level when she siphoned magic from me, like we were alone together experiencing the mysteries of the universe. This time, with her siphoning from me while I was still a wolf, it felt doubly so. I tuned out her father, sister, and best friend and just concentrated on Josie. Instead of the wan, recumbent figure before me, I swear I had a vision of her face, full of life, surrounded by beams of light, smiling at me, eyes penetrating my soul. With that vision in my head, I shortly lost consciousness.

I woke up lying naked on the floor with Josie’s hand just above my neck. As I groggily raised my head, and started to raise my body before realizing my condition, I heard Lizzie shout, with a mixture of concern and elation, “Hope!”

Still disoriented, I managed to reply, “Um, can someone get me a blanket or something?” (Once again, why don’t we use the freaking infirmary? They’d have these sorts of things right there….)

“MG, center cabinet, middle drawer,” I heard Dr Saltzman say, and a moment later I felt an afghan being draped over me. I gathered it around me and pushed myself into a sitting position, eyes immediately drawn to the young witch laying on the couch in front of me. Josie’s hair had returned to its natural brownish hue, and her skin color was no longer eerily pale. I felt myself let out a sigh of relief. Blood was still flowing from blood bags through the tubes into her, but she no longer looked like she had done battle with Death and lost.

“How long…?” I inquired.

“Josie siphoned from you for 10 minutes, and then you suddenly shifted back and collapsed right in front of us, just now,” Lizzie replied. “Are you OK, Hope?”

“I no longer feel like my heart is beating so hard it’s going to burst through my chest, so…yeah. Josie siphoning took all that adrenaline and nervous magical energy, so I feel strangely fine.” I quickly scanned the room, then added, “Wait, where’s Kaleb?”

“He’s gone to get more blood for Josie, since she truly was drained,” MG replied.

As if on cue, Kaleb zoomed back into the room, a cooler under each of his arms. “I hit every hospital and blood bank in a 3-county area; hopefully this will be enough.” Lizzie and Dr Saltzman each grabbed a new bag from a cooler and began replacing the empty bags that had been refilling Josie with blood.

Kaleb then looked at me with a worried face, but before he could say anything, we all caught a slight movement from Josie on the couch. Slowly her eyelids fluttered open, revealing those deep brown eyes so full of love and compassion. They met mine, and the corners of her mouth turned up slightly as she began to smile. “Thank you,” she said softly.

The next couple of minutes were a blur as Lizzie and Dr Saltzman hugged Josie and asked if she was OK and all the other sorts of ridiculous things people always ask someone who has clearly just been through the ringer. Suddenly, though, all eyes were on me.

“Hope, where’s Alyssa?” they asked, nearly in unison.

I felt my heart fall through my chest and shatter. For a moment while my (and our) focus was on Josie, I had managed to forget about what happened to the young witch, the erstwhile roommate who had saved my life.

I took a deep breath and dropped my head to avoid the room full of worried faces staring at me, but then started speaking. “She saved my life,” I began while shaking my head briefly. “The monster threw a huge boulder at us right after you guys left with Josie and Lizzie,” I continued, briefly making eye contact with MG and Kaleb. “He missed, but it collapsed the entrance to the mausoleum around us. Alyssa got thrown to the side, and my legs were trapped under the rubble. The monster was gaining on us fast, so she created a gas leak and tried to blow it up.” I looked at Alaric with a sheepish smile and added, “Sorry, Dr Saltzman, I know Mayor Donovan’s not going to be thrilled about that.”

“But it had no effect; the monster just walked right through the fireball, unscathed. Alyssa tried attacking it again, but…,” my voice trailed off. I didn’t want to relive that trauma. I didn’t want to acknowledge that my mistakes contributed to it. I didn’t want to give them the terrible news.

“Alyssa said she’d changed her mind; the best revenge was for us to live knowing she saved my life. That was the last thing she said before Malivore absorbed her. That, and to tell MG that she loved him.” I took several deep breaths, trying to stop myself from hyperventilating.

“Wait, Malivore’s not a pit anymore?” Lizzie interjected.

“I thought witches, vampires, and werewolves were immune from absorption; Malivore was only supposed to capture other supernaturals…?” added MG, his voice dropping and pausing erratically as it always did when he was processing confusing information.

“Why do we remember Alyssa?” finished Dr Saltzman.

I sighed. “I think that when I jumped into the pit, I must have broken the prohibition on absorbing witches, vampires, and werewolves. Tribrid. Unclear rules of loopholes. You know,” I answered with a frown, still trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone. “And maybe breaking that prohibition also nullified the memory-wipe, at least for those species? Whatever it is, it’s all my fault. Alyssa would still be here if I had….”

“You don’t know that, Hope,” Josie suddenly, and forcefully, interrupted me and entered the conversation. “Stop blaming yourself for _everything_. The changes could just as easily have been caused by his reconstitution by black magic this morning.”

“What!?” came the startled reply from her father.

Josie continued, “I still don’t know what happened after I went to sleep cuddled with Lizzie last night, but I woke up early this morning chained over a pentagram in the mausoleum where the super squad found me. The Necromancer was there with someone in a creepy hooded red robe, who was attaching leech-headed tubes to me.” Josie gave an involuntary shudder as she remembered that part. “The tubes connected to a glass orb. The Necromancer began explaining his evil plan to me; he was going to use my black magic to bring back a monster to end all monsters and then use it to wipe out the school and take over the world.”

“Jo, I thought you said the black magic was gone when we came back from the prison world?”

“That’s what I thought, Lizzie. I couldn’t feel it anymore, and obviously I wasn’t all Dark Josie last night. I told The Necromancer as much, and he just cackled at me. ‘Poor girl,’ he said, ‘You have so much to learn about the ways of dark magic. It is all still inside of you, and I am going to bring it out!’ He started listing people he was going to torture and kill, MG, Dad, you…,” she trailed off, before continuing, softly, ”…Hope. The next thing I knew, Dark Josie was back, swearing she would dismember him in the most violent and disgusting ways, make him rue the day he met her. But he and his hooded companion began chanting a spell, and black blood began to flow from my body through the leech-tubes and into the orb. My blood, glistening with black magic. As he drained more and more blood, Dark Josie slowly faded away, and by the time he had filled the orb, it was just me there.”

“I’m so sorry, Jo,” Lizzie and I said quietly, in unison. While Josie had been relating her terrifying morning, Lizzie had placed her hand on Josie’s head, stroking her twin’s hair gently, while I had gently taken Josie’s left hand, the one that had but a few minutes earlier been siphoning from me, grasping it softly in mine.

“I thought waking up alone, vomiting black bile and oozing black blood from everywhere else was a crappy morning,” Lizzie continued, “but you win suckiest morning, hands down.”

Josie cast a sad look her sister’s direction before continuing. “When the orb was full, The Necromancer began another spell; the orb began glowing and was surrounded by blue and gold and black charged fields, crackling amongst themselves. He picked it up and walked over to a small black area on the floor that I hadn’t noticed before; it looked like a tiny tar pit, just like the Malivore pit by the town square had looked before Clarke closed it. Then The Necromancer threw the orb at the pit, and it exploded on contact, unleashing a blinding flash of light. When I could see again, the orb was back on its stand, empty. At first I thought nothing had happened with the mini-pit, but then the black goo started to rise from it, slowly forming a large bipedal body. After a bit, it stabilized and began to turn clay-colored and gain more defined features, like hands and eyes and a mouth…oh, and the Triad logo on its forehead. Finally, it, or he, let out a roar and he turned and started to run away. The Necromancer and his stooge ran out after Malivore, and shortly after that is when you showed up to rescue me,” Josie concluded, with both a sigh of exhaustion and a smile at the memory of her rescue.

“So, let me get this straight. We’re facing The Necromancer, the bastard who raised Bio-Mom and made her bury Josie alive, and he’s out to get us, _and_ Malivore—who we still don’t know how to kill, who can absorb witches and probably all supernaturals, and who now can run around after us?!” Lizzie summarized in a mixture of fear and incredulity. “We’re screwed.”

§

We had survived the last nearly-two decades of people wanting us dead, from birth (or, really, from before birth!). We survived an assault by Triad with Malivore bullets. A string of monsters we had no idea even existed. A monster as headmaster. Josie’s black magic blowback. A collapsing prison world and a psychotic Heretic. We survived this morning.

And now…well, maybe it’s too late for all of us now. Lizzie’s probably right; we’re screwed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was such a short, boring chapter; the last one was a hard act to follow! But I reached a stopping point writing and wanted to get _something_ out again.
> 
> Incidentally, this concludes where I envisioned the original chapter 2 (in the original 3-chapter conception of this story) ending. That also means this is the end of “past events” and everything going forward will be happening in the present, at least in theory.
> 
> I hope this will tide everyone over, though, until The Necromancer and Malivore drop by, up to no good. I think Hope is right that Lizzie is right; our heroes seem like they’re screwed.


	6. It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back, with another chapter that rambles around—but there are an increasing number of sweet Hosie moments, so I hope that will make up for the lack of forward motion.
> 
> I heard on the radio Saturday evening that local-ish band REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” was back on the charts again 30-some years after it was originally released, and it felt like kismet while writing this chapter.

Chapter 6: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Lizzie’s probably right; we’re screwed.

§

I shook myself out of my stupor as I remembered the rest of my story I had yet to relate to the others, and, still distracted by the forthcoming danger, I sprang to my feet.

I watched Josie’s eyes go wide, then turned my head to the office door as I heard it open again. Landon stepped inside, and I watched his face change from a sort of calm seriousness to barely concealed anger. “Seriously, Hope!?”

At the same time, I heard Lizzie lightly slap Josie and playfully but sarcastically add, “Take a picture, Jo; it’ll last longer,” and then chuckle.

At that moment, I realized I was still naked after my escape from Malivore, only partly covered by the afghan that MG had given me earlier. Now that I was standing, I was giving Josie, Lizzie, and now Landon a bit of a show! I quickly used my free hand to pull the edges of the afghan together near my waist, ending the R-rated scene.

“Do you ever think before you do something, Hope?” Landon muttered, still annoyed. He had really gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

I ignored him again and continued my tale of the morning’s encounter with Malivore. “Malivore was chasing me after he absorbed Alyssa.” Landon’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped wide open as he got his first news of what had transpired during the rescue mission. “I wasn’t fast enough to outrun him as a witch, so I jumped and shifted into my wolf in mid-air so I could outrun him.”

“Damn, girl!” came the soft accolade from Kaleb, still wiping the stray tear from his mourning of Alyssa.

Josie’s face, though, was beaming; she looked at me with a mixture of admiration and something… _else_ …that I couldn’t quite place, the light in her chestnut eyes dancing and a wide smile across the lower portion of her head. Even Lizzie had a look on her face that indicated she was impressed. Dr Saltzman looked pensive, and I could see the wheels turning in his head, preparing a lecture on how I needed to be more careful.

I continued, “He was still chasing me when I reached the edge of the school grounds, but he had fallen well behind. I could still see the trees in the forest shaking when I reached the barrier, so he hadn’t given up. After I came through, I reinforced the barrier with one of my grandmother’s spells…but by now, he could be here any minute,” I concluded with a sense of urgency.

Landon finally closed his mouth and let his eyes return to normal, and then he shook his head. “After Ms Tig and the witches put the barrier up around the inner campus, Wade and I started patrolling it by air. We did see the trees in the forest shaking, coming closer and closer, for a while, but then they started moving back in the direction of the cemetery. They’ve been completely still for the last few minutes, so I came down to check in and update everyone.”

“Thank goodness for small favors,” muttered Lizzie.

“It’s certainly just a reprieve,” her father picked up the conversation, “but probably not much of one. The Necromancer and Malivore are certainly going to come after us again based on what Josie and Hope have told us, and they’re going to be able to choose the time and the place. We can catch our breath, but that’s probably about it.”

“Great,” Landon replied curtly. “That’ll give Hope time to go put on some clothes,” he intoned, with a pointed glare in my direction. I heard MG chuckle in the background.

“I’d like to change out of these shredded pajamas, too,” Josie added. “Not really the best choice for fighting monsters.”

“Let’s all take a few minutes to clean up,” Dr Saltzman directed, “and I’ll go check in with Emma and the younger students. Spread the word, all the upper school students will meet in the main hall in 15 minutes. Dismissed.”

Kaleb, MG, and Landon left to start spreading the word about the assembly. Dr Saltzman looked at his two—in his mind, still little—girls and me. “Girls…” he started.

“We’re fine,” the three of us said in unison, interrupting him.

“Go check in with Emma and the younger students,” I added.

“OK,” he said, as he hugged each one of us in turn. “Thank you, Hope,” he whispered in my ear as he pulled me tight, “for saving both of my girls this morning. Your mom and dad would be very proud.”

I felt tears start to well up in my eyes and then trace their way down my cheeks as he slowly loosened his grip on me, and I nodded lightly as he released me and headed for the door.

Lizzie had finished disconnecting Josie from the tubes that had refilled her with blood and then offered her brunette twin a hand to help her to her feet. “When today is done, we are so going to burn that couch.” Josie chuckled, evidently having been filled in earlier on the morning events she had missed. She pulled her blonde twin into a sideways hug while reaching her other hand towards me. She raised her hand to my face and gently wiped the tears away with her thumb.

“Shall we, ladies?” Lizzie continued, starting to walk towards the door.

Josie touched the talisman on her necklace and, ironically, whispered something, and the next thing I knew, a few clasps had appeared on the afghan, securing the edges together and allowing me to remove the hand that had been clutching it closed at my waist. “I really liked what I saw,” Josie said at a normal volume but with a slightly lower pitch, then chuckled and continued, “but I think it’s best we don’t… _distract_ …anyone right now.” As I glanced over at her, I swear I saw the tip of her tongue disappearing back into her mouth as if it had just been licking her lips, before her face quickly transitioned into sheepishness.

As we passed through the office door and headed for the dorms, Lizzie locked arms with her twin, and then Josie gently reached for my now-free hand, gently clasping it in hers before intertwining our fingers. I felt a wave of warmth pass through my body. This felt right, I thought, like being in my mother’s arms. Contentment was not a feeling I had known often in my life, but I was pretty sure this is what it felt like.

It might be the end of the world as we know it, but with Josie’s hand entwined with my hand, I feel fine.

§

As we continued to make our way back to our dorms, I caught sight of Kaleb pulling MG into a corner, behind a plant, thinking they were shielded from view—and they would have been, if I hadn’t been looking in that direction when he did so. Kaleb put his hand inside his jacket and pulled out a blood bag. I strained my ears and heard Kaleb say to MG, “One bag, bro. I need you amped up for this fight, but I don’t want you to lose control; we need a warrior, not a ripper. Do you think you can handle it?” I watched MG nod and take the bag from Kaleb, extend his fangs, and start to drink.

As we finished passing by, I could tell that Kaleb had more than just the one blood bag stashed inside his jacket; he must have grabbed some other bags that weren’t Josie’s blood type while he was raiding the local hospitals and probably planned on distributing them to his most trusted vampires before we went into battle. I know he had a bit of a rocky start here at the school, and with MG, but he’s grown into a shrewd and capable leader of the vampires and a friend we can count on. I’ll be glad to have him at full strength when we face The Necromancer and Malivore.

§

The three of us didn’t talk much as we walked back to our rooms, the gravity of the situation no doubt weighing on us. Or maybe we were distracted by a warm feeling, at least some of us. Or…something. When we reached my room, we paused, with Lizzie separating from Josie and me just slightly. Josie ducked her head in the direction of my ear, whispering, “Thank you for helping save me, and for taking care of Lizzie this morning.”

I angled my head toward her face and quietly replied, “Always, Jo.” The next thing I knew, I felt my face becoming warm and flushed as Josie’s lips briefly pressed against my right cheek.

I heard a snicker in the background, then the words “teddy bear” followed; Lizzie was enjoying this far too much. “Hope, I wish you could see your face right now,” she laughed, before grabbing her sister’s arm. “C’mon, Jo; let’s get you dressed for battle,” I heard her say as she pulled her twin away from me and towards their room.

§

It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes when I heard a knock at my door. I was dressed again, though angry about having lost my favorite monster-battling jeans and boots to the forest this morning, and I was sitting on the floor next to my secret grimoire storage spot, leafing through another of great-aunt Dahlia’s grimoires. “Hope?” It was Josie’s voice, “Are you ready?”

I tore another page from the grimoire and answered, “Just a second.” I once again put the grimoires and their concealing floorboard back, then got up and walked to the door, trying to avoid making eye contact with any of Alyssa’s things. I exited and locked the door behind me, then grasped Josie’s hand and intertwined our fingers like it was completely normal. Lizzie once again linked arms with her twin and the three of us headed off to the main hall.

When we arrived, the hall was already mostly full of our fellow supernatural teens, and a low murmur moved back and forth across the room, everyone no doubt sharing rumors about the reason for the assembly and about the morning’s events. None of us had intended to make an entrance, but suddenly the room got quiet and all heads swiveled in our direction. Arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand, the three of us walked in and took seats together just off the center aisle, a few rows from the front.

I had seen Landon look at me with an expression that, for once, I could not read. Rafael was sitting next to his brother and best friend; the former wolf alpha’s eyes went wide, and then a cloak of sadness overcame his face. I felt a pang of guilt rip through my chest, but I shook it away; I couldn’t focus on their misgivings right now. Landon and I had been out of sync for weeks now, and today had only shined a hard light on that fact. I had no idea if Raf’s sadness was for his brother or if it was for his own unrequited feelings. Either way, it couldn’t bother me right now. Landon and I needed to have a talk when all this was over, but it wasn’t like Josie and I were together, either. The twins and I had had epically crappy mornings (leading into this epically crappy noontime), and we were just supporting each other like we had done the entire time we had been friends.

Thankfully, Dr Saltzman entered the hall with Ms Tig, saving me from my thoughts and the three of us from more awkward stares. When he reached the lectern, he began to speak. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice this morning. I know that many rumors and bits of information have been going around already, so I will get straight to the facts. Today, we are facing an existential threat, more severe and more dangerous than anything we have ever faced. Last night, Josie was kidnapped by The Necromancer, who used her blood to reconstitute Malivore in his original monster form.” Gasps went up around the room. “Hope, Lizzie, MG, Kaleb, and Alyssa Chang mounted a rescue earlier this morning, bringing Josie back but encountering The Necromancer and Malivore. In the process of making their escape, Malivore absorbed Alyssa.” The gasps this time were louder and stronger, followed by sobs from some of Alyssa’s clique of mischievous witches, and even from Jed, her other erstwhile suitor. Someone really should have told them beforehand, but it had slipped all of our minds in the rush to get ready to defend the school. Landon, of all people, reached an arm over to comfort Jed.

Alaric continued, “Ms Tig and some of the witches have put up a barrier spell around the inner campus, and we’ve relocated the younger students to safer and more defensible parts of the school already. We know that The Necromancer plans to use Malivore to attack the school, and he chased Hope most of the way back to campus before turning around. Right now, we don’t know when or where they plan to make their assault, only that it is coming, as surely as you are all special. We will do everything in our power to defend the school and all of its students, but, as the oldest and strongest students, we are going to need your help. Landon and Wade have been flying patrols inside the barrier to watch for any activity outside it, and they will resume that as soon as this assembly is over. If we can see the monsters coming, that will give us early warning before they even reach the barrier.”

“We will need a few of you to remain with the younger students and help protect them. Then we’d like half of you to remain near the entrances to the school, to serve as a second line of defense while the other half engages the monsters as soon as they penetrate the barrier. We will try to drive them back and keep them from getting to the school itself. I know this is a lot to ask; I know that this is something I really cannot ask, because I promised that this school would always keep you safe. No one will think less of you if you choose not to join this battle. We did not create this school to train warriors; we built this school to help you learn and understand your gifts and how to fit in the world with them. I know we have been able to do that, but I am sorry we have been unable to keep you safe. I am truly sorry.”

The room became deathly quiet for a few seconds after Dr Saltzman ceased speaking, and then, slowly, a quiet chant emerged from the crowd. “Sal-va-tore, Sal-va-tore, Sal-va-tore,” rising in volume as it traveled around the assembled students, finally reaching a crescendo as we all shouted it one last time at the top of our lungs. We would have our army; if only I felt better about our chances of success with it.

“Thank you. Thank you all,” continued Dr Saltzman. “Those of you who are willing to fight on the front lines, please come see me. Those of you who want to guard the perimeter of the school, please go see Ms Tig, and those who want to look out for the younger students, please follow the astral projection of Professor Vardemus. Landon, Wade, please return to your patrols. Dismissed.”

The student body split into groups to meet with their adult coordinators and prepare for what was sure to be the devastating battle to come. We had no idea how to defeat The Necromancer, let alone Malivore, who was suddenly mortally dangerous to all of us. I was afraid that many of my classmates would die. I was fairly certain that before it was all over, I was going to have to die, twice. Maybe we would get lucky and be able to drive them back today, but even that would just be postponing the inevitable. I was thoroughly lacking in my namesake right now.

§

Josie slipped her hand into mine again, this time squeezing it tightly. I turned to look at her, and her face was steadfast and assured. She leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I’ve got you, Hope. I believe in you.” And, as though she could read my thoughts, ”And I’ve got enough hope for the both of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stayed up way too late Saturday night writing this chapter, but it turned out to be 3 hours I managed not to think about what’s going on in world right now, so that was a silver lining—and you got this chapter. I hope you enjoyed the bits of Hosie as much as I enjoyed writing them.
> 
> It’s become increasingly difficult for me to write the latter part of this story as things out there worsen; I think these rambling, no-action chapters are my subconscious way of trying to put off the impending battle (and the angst and hurt that will surround it) while the real world is hurting. But I don’t think I can interpolate any more chapters, so either the pain will come or this story will end up on hiatus.
> 
> Please be careful out there, and I hope you’re all well. Remember: Stay Safe and Ship Hosie.


	7. The Gathering Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing like…uh…10 months to get another chapter out. Yeah. And this isn’t even any of the stuff I was dreading writing, _aka_ the finale. But at least there are words again?
> 
> P.S. Apologies to [Winston Churchill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_World_War_\(book_series\)).

Chapter 7: The Gathering Storm

“And I’ve got enough hope for the both of us.” If only all of us could have Josie’s boundless optimism in the face of our certain doom.

§

After the front-line students had all gathered around Dr Saltzman, he gave us perfunctory instructions about readying ourselves for a deadly fight and asked Josie to organize the witches, Kaleb to organize the vampires, and Jed to do the same with the wolves. Before Josie could start her work, her father rushed over and swooped both of his daughters into a tight hug, finally severing Josie’s hand from mine. “I love you both so much, girls,” the grizzled headmaster whispered, choking back a sob.

“We love you, too, dad,” I heard the twins whisper back in unison.

As the hug broke apart, Alaric called out to me, grabbing my arm and pulling me away from Josie and Lizzie. I turned briefly to catch Josie’s eye as the distance began to accumulate between us; she nodded assuringly and gave me a brief smile before she faced the witches and turned on what I’d taken to calling “Honor Council representative mode” as she took charge. As I returned my head to face the direction of travel, out of the corner of my eye I saw Kaleb surreptitiously handing blood bags to his trusted lieutenants.

I was broken from my thoughts by the sound of Alaric’s voice; I could tell we were headed in the direction of the armory, no doubt to collect some of his cache of unsafe weapons. “Thank you again for saving both my girls today, Hope. I…I…don’t think I would have made it if something had happened….” He paused for a moment, drawing to a stop and turning to face me before putting his hands on my shoulders. “I know this is bad now, Hope, but you can’t do anything crazy out there. I need you to live. This school needs you to live. My girls need you to live.” Another pause. “Promise me you will fall back to the school if we get overwhelmed at the barrier. Promise me, Hope,” he pleaded.

I stared at him, unwilling to make that promise. We both knew that it was Malivore or me, and there was nothing I would not do to protect the school, the people I loved, … Josie. I was a Mikaelson, dammit, and the world’s only tribrid, immortal—at least in theory—and I was not about to shy from a fight. But I could tell from the look on Dr Saltzman’s face that he was not going to take no for an answer, and I didn’t want to end up on the sidelines, to chance Marcel having loaned Alaric the cursed shackles they’d used on the Hollow and me as a child, so I decided this required a different tack.

“Only if you promise me the same, Dr Saltzman. Josie and Lizzie need you. These kids need you. Some days you’re completely wrong for this job, but only you and Caroline could have created this place. Only you understand the lines and the balance required. And only you know your way around the institutions of this crazy town,” I concluded with a chuckle, hoping to lighten the mood. “OK?”

“OK, Hope, I promise,” he sighed and then looked expectantly at me.

“I promise, too, Dr Saltzman,” I replied, knowing full well neither of us intended to keep these promises. I’d throw him out of the way if necessary, though, because the other things we’d said to each other…those were true, no matter how hard we wanted to free ourselves from them.

We walked in silence after that for what seemed an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. It was thick and pregnant with danger, as we no doubt both plotted the betrayal of our recent promises.

“I want to give Josie and Lizzie my blood,” I finally blurted out, unsure of any way to gracefully segue to the topic. It had been on my mind since our escape from Malivore earlier this morning, throbbing in my brain like a headache. “I know you don’t want them to become vampires, and I know that they don’t want to become vampires, but if it’s a choice between that and death, isn’t it a better alternative than death?”

The look on his face was one of pure anguish, as if someone had just told him he had to choose which of his two daughters got to live. Pain and terror all merged into one, swirling in his eyes. Still, he remained silent, his tongue caught in the emptiness of his mouth, waiting for words to form in his brain. Finally, I blurted out again, “I’m not asking for your permission. Just like I don’t believe in the antediluvian patriarchal practice of a suitor seeking permission from a daughter’s father to ask for her hand in marriage, like she is a cow or some possession, I’m not asking here. But out of respect for you, I am letting you know first, and I would very much like to have your blessing.”

“Are…are you going to ask the girls, or are you making that decision for them, too, Hope?”

“Of course I will ask them,” I replied, with a hint of exasperation creeping into my voice. “But in this scenario, I believe they’d agree with me. And I can be very persuasive, if I need to be,” I concluded, without a hint of malice or sarcasm; I knew in this instance I could convince the twins simply by reiterating the life-or-death situation in which we found ourselves.

“Okay,” Alaric sighed. “But you have to face their mother.”

“She loves me,” I replied with a grin. With that, our conversations ended, and we proceeded to fill our hands, and every satchel we could find, full of weapons from the armory, in the hopes that something would provide us a defense against Malivore and The Necromancer.

§

By the time Dr Saltzman and I had returned from the armory, Wade dropped from the sky (landings still were not his strong suit) to let us know that he and Landon had spotted Malivore and The Necromancer approaching from the road. Our last fight was upon us. Or my last fight, at least.

As Alaric started rounding us up, I snuck over to the twins, grabbed their hands, and pulled us into a corner. “What the hell, Hope?” Lizzie whisper-yelled at me. I ignored her in favor of extending my fangs and biting into my wrist.

“Hope…?” Josie softly questioned.

“This is going to be a deadly battle. I will do everything I can to keep the two of you safe, but I cannot promise I will succeed. I need you to live. I know it’s not what you want…what any of us want…but if something happens…it’s better to be a Heretic than dead. I could never live with myself if I somehow made it through but you both didn’t.”

Josie gave me a sympathetic look with those soft, brown eyes of hers before raising my bleeding wrist to her mouth and drinking. “Ugh…that’s disgusting. How does MG do this every day?”

“Jo! What are you doing?” her blonde twin exclaimed in shock and, perhaps, even a bit of outrage.

“You heard her, Liz. I couldn’t live without you here with me if…if…something happens,” Josie replied, choking back tears. “I don’t want to be a vampire, either, but I don’t want today to be my last day on this earth. I need you, and I know you need me, too. Please, Lizzie, drink, and we’ll sort out whatever happens together, alive….”

Lizzie was still hesitant, with the near-death experience—and non-consensual consumption of vampire blood—of the day before still weighing heavily on her mind, but Josie’s face began to form into her trademark pout—and I felt like melting, while Lizzie seemed to have built up some immunity to it. “Fine,” she finally replied, with a huff. “But if anything happens, I’m holding Mikaelson responsible.” She, too, grabbed my wrist and raised it to her mouth to drink, practically gagging on the blood. “This is so much easier when it’s been spiked into your wine,” she glared at me.

Josie chuckled, doing her best to suppress a full-blown laugh.

“Sorry, Lizzie, I didn’t have time to seduce you and ply you with wine first,” I parried with a grin; I couldn’t help it.

Josie nearly choked suppressing her laughter at my retort.

“Not funny, Jo. Now we’re walking vampire time-bombs. All because our hero Hope can’t vanquish our mortal enemies with all her Mikaelson mojo.”

I chose to ignore the remainder of Lizzie’s repeated jabs; she was deflecting her fear and nervousness, as any normal person in this position would do. I just happened to be a convenient target, and, not wrongly, part of the cause of our whole situation. If I hadn’t jumped into Malivore and failed to kill him, Josie wouldn’t have been lost and Clarke wouldn’t have been able to infiltrate the school posing as Headmaster Vardemus and seduce her into doing black magic. And none of the events of the past few days would have happened. They might as well rename the Law of Unintended Consequences after my family.

“Hope.” Josie put her arm to my shoulder and gently shook me, breaking my spiraling thoughts. “Dad’s calling for us. And you’d better not be inside that beautiful head of yours beating yourself up over this.”

§

Indeed, Dr Saltzman was preparing his final pep talk for those of us at the front lines and those who would remain at the perimeter of the school itself. Landon landed just outside the doors and came in to report that our enemies were nearing the gates—and thus the barrier—and that so far, mercifully, it appeared to be just The Necromancer, Malivore, and a dog.

“I want everyone to pair up in threes: one witch, one wolf, and one vampire. That will allow everyone maximum protection from whatever comes, because there’s no way that The Necromancer won’t have reinforcements. And, most importantly…under no circumstances is anyone to engage Malivore directly. Stay out of his reach. You can defend yourself from him with spells and projectiles from a distance, but do not get near him. If you are overwhelmed, fall back to the school. If we cannot stop them at the school, try to lead them into the forest and away from the lower school. You can do this. You are all exceptional. Now let’s go,” Dr Saltzman finished, clapping his hands a single time. As pep talks for people going into battle facing certain death went, it left much to be desired. But Alaric had managed to deftly avoid raising—or having to answer—the question that must be on everyone’s minds: how are we going to stop/kill/defeat Malivore? So I guess he gets points for that. With Jed and the wolves leading chants of “Sal-va-tore!” again, the two groups began to separate.

I whispered to Josie that I would be right back, slowly dropping her hand from where it had rested in mine during her father’s speech, and walked over to where Ms Tig stood, with Landon next to her. I fished the latest page from great-aunt Dahlia’s grimoire from my back pocket and unfolded it. “My great-aunt got this from a Phoenician sorceress from Tyre she encountered with one of my grandfather’s raiding parties. The story goes that this spell, performed by an Amorite priestess loyal to the Egyptians, was what enabled Ramesses the Great to turn the tide and win the Battle of Qadesh against the Hittites. It was also used by Alexander the Great, Hamilcar of Carthage, and possibly even Constantine during their decisive battles. It will allow whomever is present when I cast it to see what I see.”

Before Emma could object or Landon could say something stupid, I started chanting the ancient words on the page. “ _ʿAynī ʿaynik, ʿaynī ʿaynik. Fi-sh-shams, fil-qamar, fir-rīḥ, fil-baḥr. ʿAynī ʿaynik, ʿaynī ʿaynik. Fi-sh-shams, fil-qamar, fir-rīḥ, fil-baḥr._ ” [My eye is your eye, my eye is your eye. In the sun, in the moon, in the wind, in the sea. My eye is your eye, my eye is your eye. In the sun, in the moon, in the wind, in the sea.] A floating, shimmering disk or shallow pool opened up between us, and I could make out the beginnings of shapes in it.

“Hey, that’s me!” Landon exclaimed as he looked into the pool. “Oh, and that’s Josie….”

I had already turned away from Landon as he started to speak, looking back towards where I had left Josie, eager—well, that’s not exactly the right word—to get back to her side and face certain doom.

“It works!” I felt Landon’s hand on my shoulder, spinning me back to face him, his silly grin stretched across his beaming face.

“Of course it does, Landon,” I replied with a half-chuckle, trying to bury my annoyance…and avoidance. I knew what was coming next, and I so desperately wanted to avoid it and find comfort at Josie’s side instead. I could not handle being faced with yet another goodbye. And I could not bear being the person pushing Landon away, again. (Although, for once, he wasn’t running away and I wasn’t being left by someone I loved. Ironic how our roles had now flipped.)

“Well…” he stuttered, “it’s only a thirty-three-hundred year-old spell in an ancient Semitic dialect, as recorded by a crazy Mikaelson twenty-one-hundred-odd years after the fact….”

I bristled, “She was **not** a Mikaelson.” Landon threw his hands up in the air. “And that’s one of the great benefits of the trilateral root system of Semitic languages—while certain things may shift around over time and across languages, the roots carry the meanings across time and space. Now, if we’re done with today’s lesson in the linguistics of spellcasting, I really need to get back to the vanguard group and stop today’s triad of monsters.”

“Hope…” Landon looked at me pleadingly. Here it comes, I thought. “I love you, Hope. Please be careful out there.”

“You, too,” I replied, accepting his embrace. “I’ve got to go now.” As I pulled away from the boy I loved, the boy I once believed was my “Always and Forever,” I caught those chocolate-colored pools gazing longingly at me from across the room. From the way that Landon’s hands finally fell away from me, he must have seen them, too.

As I walked towards the rest of the students exiting the school, I heard him say one more thing. “You were my first love, Hope Mikaelson, and I will love you to my dying breath.”

Dammit, Landon, why did you have to say that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m…not sure I love this chapter, but I don’t think it’s complete garbage, either. It’s not exactly what I would be hoping for after waiting patiently for 10 months for more—sorry—so I hope _you_ don’t hate it _too_ much. Maybe the Hosie moments and some trademark Lizzie Saltzman make up for the rest?
> 
> There should only be one more chapter left (maybe a small epilogue if I think of something?) and I have the broad strokes sketched out and copious notes on certain scenes, and I’m excited to finish this up. But I’ve had so much trouble finding time to write in blocks large enough to make progress, so no promises. Thanks so much to everyone who has stuck with this over the sort-of-hiatus, and to everyone who has left a comment along the way; it means a lot to know that people have enjoyed this.
> 
> And remember: Stay Safe and Ship Hosie! (Because if we don’t, who will?)


	8. “The Dreams in Which I’m Dying Are the Best I’ve Ever Had”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Mentions and non-graphic (I think!) descriptions of torture; violence and death…there’s a battle. I think it falls within canon-appropriate levels of violence (though perhaps more to the TVD/TO side), but better safe than sorry with TW, no?
> 
> \--
> 
> A year ago(!) when I started writing this story, “Mad World” was showing up all over the place, even before the pandemic had hit the US; as I was plotting the end of the story, that seemed like a fitting lyric for this chapter. (If somehow you missed the quarantine acoustic version from the singer and his teenage daughter last April…[go listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEpfvTdR5-U)!)
> 
> And, hey…I’ve managed to finish my story involving Malivore’s resurrection before canon got him resurrected…barely! Go, me! (Thanks, pandemic…but not really.)

Chapter 8: “The Dreams in Which I’m Dying Are the Best I’ve Ever Had”

“You were my first love, Hope Mikaelson, and I will love you to my dying breath.”

Dammit, Landon, why did you have to say that?

§

My head was still spinning as I stepped through the door to the school and into a crowd of fellow students. I could feel the anxiety, the fear, the adrenaline seeping off of everyone—not a great match for my spinning head. Of course Landon would make a grand gesture (or grand pronouncement, as the case may be) just as I was about to step into battle. He had no sense of timing. And isn’t it the person headed into the unwinnable battle who is supposed to proclaim their undying love to the person they were leaving behind, the person they were sacrificing themself for, not the other way around? Why couldn’t I say that to Landon?

Just before I felt like I was going to collapse under the weight of all of these thoughts and emotions, I felt slim fingers touch my hand and intertwine with mine. The fingers, though…that felt so natural, as though it was something that happened on a daily basis, and had done so for years. In a world tilting off its axis, her fingers locked with mine felt cosmically right.

“Hope…” Josie’s soft voice penetrated the fog, “I’ve got you.”

I shook my head briefly, willing the doubts and uncertainty to bury themselves once again. I had a battle to fight, monsters to slay, a school to save…and a life to give. “Josie….” My eyes met those deep brown pools that somehow still seemed to have an innocence about them, even after all they’d seen—especially over the past couple of days. I felt my lips forming a smile involuntarily and felt a warmness develop in my heart. She smiled back at me, bright as a candle in the darkness, and pulled me forward, through the crowd.

I saw the the triplets—triads?—Dr Saltzman had instructed everyone to form. To our right, Kaleb, Raf…and Wendy, fresh from the prison world. To our left, Jed, Lizzie, and MG—maybe I was wrong before; in the face of certain death, one chooses one’s crush over one’s best friend. And then a head of blonde curls bounced into view in front of us.

“Josie…hey. I don’t have a group yet, and it looks like you’re in need of a vampire…?” Jade spoke tentatively, her eyes darting back and forth between Josie and me.

“Sure, we’d love to have you,” came the cheery reply—even in the face of _all this_ , Josie still managed to be cheery—and she looked at me, “Right, Hope? This is Jade; she used to be my babysitter,” concluding with a bit of a giggle.

I nodded at Jade and tried to make sure I was smiling. “We met this morning, actually; Jade helped with the locator spell to find you.”

“Wait, so now you’ve helped save both Lizzie and me, all in less than 24 hours?” Josie responded, serious but with a touch of humor, as she and Jade embraced.

“I guess so. I’m so glad that you’re OK. That you’re both OK,” the vampire replied, glancing towards Lizzie.

Josie linked her other hand with Jade’s and we all turned to look down the driveway, where just at the edge of our sight we could make out our opponents.

“OK, everyone. I want six groups up front, and then form additional rows behind them,” Dr Saltzman began ordering. “Don’t spread out too far, so we can concentrate our efforts, but if more monsters start coming from the sides, groups on the edges towards the back of our formation should begin to fan out to engage those threats. And remember, keep out of physical proximity from Malivore.”

With that, our phalanx began marching towards the gates, Dr Saltzman in his fedora and leather jacket, crossbow in hand, leading the way. I shot a look to Kaleb and to MG, nodding towards our headmaster; we had to get him behind us before this battle began. Both nodded their heads in understanding.

We were 10 or 15 yards from the gates when our adversaries reached them; I could see clearly now that The Necromancer was “reigning in” his flunkies with brimstone leashes connected to collars around their necks…and that the “dog” Wade and Landon had spotted was in fact Cerberus, the 3-headed hound of the Underworld. And then I gasped…for the center head was not in fact canine, but Clarke’s, looking very much less than thrilled to have a pair of vicious dog-heads on either side—though he still managed a sneer. I could hear The Necromancer cackling with glee, talking to himself, behind his monsters.

Malivore stepped right up to the barrier, and rather than being repelled, he seemed to push into it, like a hand into hot plastic. Then, suddenly, the edges of the “deformed plastic” seemed to tear away from the rest of the barrier, and in an instant, that portion of the barrier was sucked into his torso. I felt Josie’s fingers tighten around mine. Malivore had just torn a giant-mudman-shaped hole in our magical barrier.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement; MG had just grabbed Dr Saltzman from in front of us and deposited him safely a couple of rows back. Just in time, because The Necromancer let go of his brimstone leashes, and Malivore lumbered towards us while Cerberus-Clarke bounded through the hole. Suddenly, we were surrounded by roars and screams. Behind Malivore, what was certainly the Abominable Snowman sprung into existence, complete with his own snowstorm. Another statue near the gates sprung to life, no doubt another gargoyle resurrected. The sky suddenly darkened with nine giant pterodactyl-like creatures, each bearing a black-cloaked rider.

“Nazgûl!” Lizzie cried out, pointing skyward.

Wait, what? Tolkien’s creatures were real? (Also, apparently Lizzie had read the books, or at least seen the movies, and hadn’t simply cherry-picked her “hobbit” insult.)

Joining them overhead, swirling, screeching, and starting to dive towards us, were other, wraith-like creatures, their decaying hands the only things visible beyond their hooded cloaks. “Dementors!?” Josie gasped.

“What is this, Hogwart’s? Did I miss something in the past decade?” inquired Jade, still trying to make sense of the current world after her years in the prison world.

“What’s next, Mothra…?” exclaimed MG, far too excitedly for our safety.

“Don’t,” I attempted to cut MG off before he finished his thought.

Then, rising from the earth in front of The Necromancer (who was waving his hands wildly), a group of what appeared to be zombies began lumbering towards us.

“Dude! Don’t they know this is Mystic Falls, not Atlanta!?” cried Kaleb.

The horrors kept coming. By this time The Necromancer was also inside the hole in the barrier, and we had all involuntarily moved backward a few yards to give us more breathing room, as well as beginning to fan out to contain some of the monsters. The next thing we knew, Dana appeared in front of The Necromancer, armed with an axe. “I’ve got an axe to grind with you, Psycho Saltzman!” she exclaimed, the expression a bit on the nose.

And then I heard Josie and Jade gasp in unison. Kai, complete with a bleeding cut the entire circumference of his neck, had materialized out of thin air, a sword in his hand. Diego, still in his wolfman form, appeared after Kai. Then…Sebastian, who appeared to have traded his sixteenth-century colonial finery for something closer to pirate attire. Behind The Necromancer, MG’s mother with a squad of Triad commandos rolled up in their vehicles, not attacking Malivore or any of the other monsters, instead joining them in menacing us again. “Oh, yes, when I resurrected Malivore, I brought all of Triad under my thrall!” I heard The Necromancer cackle with glee.

I realized that The Necromancer was summoning the people who could affect us the most—hurt us the most—just like he had done on the twins’ Sweet Sixteen with Jo and with Raf’s late girlfriend Cassie. MG’s mom, Sebastian, Kai, Diego…they were all daggers into the heart of one or more of us. I felt dread rising deep in the pit of my stomach, building like a tsunami wave preparing to crush land. Who was he going to bring back—rip out of their afterlife at peace—to torment me? My father, who gave his immortal life to save me? Uncle Elijah, whose commitment to “Always and Forever” and to redeeming my father extended even to death? …Oh, god, no! My mother, who loved me more than anything and who I got killed with my selfishness? I felt my knees begin to buckle as I started to hyperventilate. Everything was going black….

And then I felt Josie begin to siphon from me, the warm, gentle pulsing of magic transferring between us slowing my too-rapid breathing and beginning to calm me, and her thumb began to stroke the back of my hand. The next thing I registered was her voice, strong, calm, and clear, “Witches! Shields up!” Like the Roman legions or the hoplite phalanx, I saw a series of interlocking magical shields appear at the edges of our formation and above us, protecting us from the diving dementors and Nazgûl. Then, “Incendia!” and fireballs hurled through the air towards their targets, looking almost like a division of catapults at a medieval siege. The battle was joined.

§

Diego and Kai both rushed towards where MG had spirited Dr Saltzman, whose crossbow bolts were having little effect on the murderous Heretic. Kaleb, Raf, and Wendy moved to intercept them, throwing punches and fireballs (naturally; Wendy was a Salvatore School witch, after all!) at the evil twosome. “Oh, Ric, poor, silly Ric,” Kai taunted, “I am looking forward to tearing you limb from limb—or maybe letting Diego here do the tearing—while I make your daughters watch, and then keeping you alive and making you watch as I do the same to them. I will have my revenge, and it will be sweet, sweet Saltzman blood.” The monster licked his lips and charged once more, swinging his sword to deflect crossbow bolts.

Further to the right, a group was taking on the Abominable Snowman, who emitted a white-out blizzard within a 10-yard radius. To our left, Dana, Sebastian, MG’s mother and the squad of Triad commandos advanced on Jed, Lizzie, and MG. Further to the left, the zombies and gargoyle menaced our flank. Headed straight towards us were the three worst monsters of them all, Cerberus-Clarke, Malivore, and The Necromancer himself. I heard the black-magic death spell I’d used against the dragon slip from my lips again as I thrust my hand in the direction of The Necromancer. Nothing happened.

“Oh, foolish girl. You really think death has any power over me, The Almighty, The All-Powerful, Necromancer!” he again cackled. “You, little tribrid, are nothing in the face of my power.”

From the corner of my eye, I caught MG zipping from the line and stopping immediately behind Dana, his fangs extended, dark veins coursing through his eyes. With a swift movement of his hands, he’d snapped the girl’s neck, and she crumbled to the ground. Just as quickly, the vampire grabbed the axe she was carrying as it fell and tossed it to Jed, who was engaging the Triad squad with another group of students. Finally, he darted right back to Lizzie’s side, where she took his hand and began to siphon more magic from him.

Sebastian approached them, fangs bared, and Lizzie was trying to hold in tears and steel her face, as yet unwilling to harm the vampire. “I am truly sorry, Elizabeth; I am merely conforming to my true nature,” her former paramour began. “You see, back in my day, they called me ‘Sebastian the Merciless,’ the most vicious pirate of the era. I did try to change, to be a better person…” he paused, looking wistfully in the direction of the coast, “once…but you know how that played out; I got the last witch I loved killed, along with everyone around her. There is no future for us; no matter how much I try to be different, I will always be a monster. No matter how alike we are in our brokenness, that is one thing that will never change: you are not a monster, and I will always be. Do not blame your father, my dear Elizabeth, for sending me away; he was protecting you and this town from me, from the monster who only wants to drink….”

“No!” Lizzie interrupted him, choking back sobs. “I don’t believe that. People can change, can grow, can have second chances. That is the whole purpose of this school. Look at MG; he made a mistake, but he’s better now, and he can control his bloodlust. Look at Stefan Salvatore. Uncle Damon. Hell, look at Hope’s father, ‘The Great Evil’ Klaus Mikaelson…” I felt a shiver go up my spine hearing Lizzie talk about my dad that way, and I saw Sebastian’s face go white for just an instant. “They all changed, conquered their bloodlust, became better people for someone they loved,” Lizzie pleaded with Sebastian.

“Ah, young Milton. See, there’s the difference. Milton was raised in a good family, a family that loved him—notwithstanding their misguided views today—and when he became a vampire, they still cared enough about him to send him to your parents’ school for guidance and to build a new family. I did not lie to you about my past; all of what I said was true. I did not have that kind of youth; I was raised by vampire-pirates, the worst of the lot. I am the monster that Milton will never be. I do love you, but just as I said to you a day ago, I cannot live in this cacophonous, invasive, twenty-first century world, even if I were not a monster…which I am.”

With that, Sebastian whooshed forward and grabbed a stake from Lizzie’s belt, placing it gently in her hands, point towards his own chest. His hands remained clasped over top of Lizzie’s. “Milton loves you, and unlike me, he can actually live in this world and be with you. Do not squander that, love.”

Then, as Lizzie sobbed “Sebastian, no!” the devilishly-charming vampire lunged towards the blonde siphon one final time, never letting go of her hands, in effect impaling himself on the stake…no doubt having found one last loophole to escape The Necromancer’s control, turning himself to dust in Lizzie’s hands—hands which dropped the stake and reached for MG’s as she collapsed in grief.

§

Outrunning his father, Cerberus-Clarke was soon nipping at my feet, two heads growling as the other spoke. “Hello again, Hope.”

“What…what happened to you, Clarke?”

“Have I ever mentioned I have an abusive father? Doesn’t take it well when people fail to carry out his plans, for instance securing bird-brother for him and killing you? Yeah, dear ol’ dad is a bit of a bastard. So when our buddy” he turned his head in the direction of The Necromancer “cut off my head and used it to relocate the pit from that bench on the town square, dad thought it would be fun to attach my head to Cerberus here.”

At that, one of the canine heads lunged at me. “Sorry about that…I recommend you sever them from their necks as soon as possible. Really irritating dogs.” I grabbed Josie’s katana and with two quick strokes severed the two canine heads, before preparing to bring the blade down once more on Clarke’s neck. “Wait! Hope! I can tell you things you need to know to defeat Malivore!”

I slowly lifted the sword away, unsure whether this was just another one of Clarke’s deceptions or whether he was telling the truth.

Behind me, I could see Diego lumbering away from Kai and Alaric and towards us, at the same time I saw Kai toss away all of the students surrounding Dr Saltzman with a flick of the wrist. From somewhere in the crowd, I heard someone yell, “Dr S!” and toss Alaric the very same sword he had used last night to sever Kai’s head the first time. And then, just like that, Kai raised a barrier spell around them, trapping Dr Saltzman in with him. My heart dropped as they engaged in single combat.

Diego by then had reached us and engaged Josie and Jade, grunting “Kai sent me over to deal with you two traitorous bitches; this is going to be fun!” I caught Josie’s eye and she nodded at me, signifying (I hope!) that she and Jade could handle him—because if Clarke really knew how to defeat Malivore, we needed to know that information, and he seemed willing—if barely—to talk only to me.

“Spill, Clarke, before I have time to think about my decision.”

“Oh, the things that you do not know, Hope. I could write volumes, best-sellers, about how close you came yet how much you missed. My favorite is about the doomed romance between you and my bird-brained brother,” he laughed.

My patience, worn thin already by the day’s events prior to Clarke’s arrival, was nearing the breaking point with his taunts.

“Hit a bit too close to home, did I? There’s that Mikaelson viciousness…and to think, that’s not even your Achilles heel. Now _that_ was a fabulous bedtime story from daddy!”

“Get on with it, Clarke. We don’t have all day, and I’d hate for ‘Daddy’ or ‘Uncle Ted’ to find out what you’ve been saying.”

“Oh, Hope, you’re no fun. Definitely a Mikaelson, though,” he chuckled again.

“So, am I or am I not the key to defeating Malivore?” I prodded. “And…do…do I have to die again first?”

“Oh, Hope, you don’t want to do that. Not a good idea for the world’s only tribrid to die in the midst of a battle.”

“Why not? I’m immortal. I’ll come back a vampire, a fully-activated tribrid, and I’ll rip them all apart.”

“No, little girl, that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t even know your own Achilles heel,” Clarke laughed cruelly. “Nature is full of loopholes to eliminate things that should not be possible to exist. And yours are a doozy.” The dog-bodied head laughed again, still taunting me. “In the period before you resurrect—well, before you transition, even—you are mortally vulnerable to anything physical that kills a normal vampire, Hope. Stake through the heart, extraction of the heart—I hear that method was a favorite of your father’s—off with the head, even, and bye-bye Hope. Sucks to be you. Especially in the midst of this battle, where any of my father’s henchmen are capable of performing those actions. Even me in this accursed body!”

Clarke’s revelations sent chills down my spine. I had no idea if they were even true, but if they were, I had many things to worry about. But I needed to focus. So far Clarke hadn’t told me anything useful about killing Malivore, only taunted and distracted me while the dark forces continued to assault all of us. I needed answers. “That’s not what I asked about; that’s not what you promised to tell me in exchange for keeping your head attached to that body,” I demanded.

“Well, technically you did ask why you shouldn’t want to die in this battle. But fair enough. You were so close the last time, though.”

“But I wasn’t a fully-activated tribrid then.”

“Oh, Hope. Can’t your blood heal people, even from Triad’s special bullets?”

Josie.

It was as though he was driving a dagger into my chest, making me relive my traumas.

“Can’t your blood create hybrids?”

Henry.

And now twisting that dagger, just for the sake of causing pain.

“Can’t your blood do all of the miraculous things that vampire blood does? Right now, even without dying. You see, you’re not the problem, Hope. You are perfectly powerful just the way you are.”

“Then why didn’t it work before? Why did my diving into the pit not destroy Malivore?” I inquired angrily as the battle continued to churn all around me, worried about the fates of my friends.

“Think, use that brilliant witchy brain of yours, Hope. What prevents someone from dying when they otherwise should be dead?” Clarke then moved his head in such a way to attempt to swing his fiery brimstone leash at me. A leash composed of a series of links.

“A linking spell? How could Malivore be linked to someone?” Oh, god. No. My stomach fell clear through my chest as my brain started putting the pieces together.

“Oh, yes, sad to say that it is what you think, Hope. I am part of my father, so you did well pulling me with you when you jumped last year. But my more-or-less immortal brother is also part of my father, so in order to destroy my father, you must also kill my brother.”

“Landon!” I wailed involuntarily, doubling over in emotional agony. To save us all, I didn’t have to die, but I had to kill my boyfriend. “No…there has to be another way. I’ll…I’ll find a way to sever the link. I’m not going to kill Landon.”

“Even if that were true—and it is not, let me assure you; he is part-Malivore just as much as I am—how would you figure out a way to sever the link in time to stop this” he made a vague circling motion with his head “in time to save everyone? Even you can’t pull that off, Hope.” As if to punctuate Clarke’s words about our predicament and the futility of my suggestion, the two vicious canine heads reattached themselves to their necks and Clarke-Cerberus lunged at me again, catching me by surprise and knocking me to the ground.

I was barely able to keep the canine heads from ripping out my throat, but they were tearing at my arms instead. I somehow found myself unable to get up, no spells were coming to my tongue…nothing. I thought this was going to be it, the immortal tribrid felled by a three-headed hell-mutt, when flames descended from the sky and a golden arrow punctured the dog’s abdomen, causing it to fall off of me. “Landon…”

“Hey, Hope,” the phoenix said with his trademark goofy grin as he retracted his wings. “I heard you needed a phoenix.” As a puzzled expression took hold of my face, he continued. “Your spell. And I can read lips. Another hidden talent,” he chuckled as he took my hand and pulled me up.

“Landon, no. We’ll find another way. I…I…can’t lose you again. We’ll figure out how to sever you from Malivore.”

Landon took my arms and replied, “Hope, you know it’s the only way. You can’t sever me from Malivore any more than you can make the blood in your veins not be Mikaelson blood. It can’t be done. You died to save me and the world; now it’s my turn.” With that, he dropped my arms, yanked the arrow from the body of Clarke-Cerberus, and plunged it into his own chest, collapsing into my arms.

“Landon!” I screamed as he went limp, no longer breathing. I ripped the arrow from his chest and began performing CPR. The golden arrow felled our new hero. He wasn’t forming his sarcophagus like before. Landon was truly dead!? I collapsed upon his chest, sobbing, completely losing track of everything going on around me, even time itself.

“Hey, Hope.” Suddenly Landon’s head rose again, and mine bolted up at the sound of his voice.

“Landon! What were you thinking?”

“Um, that the only way to kill a phoenix is with the golden arrow, and we need to kill a phoenix in order for you to be able to kill Malivore,” he replied, a hint of amusement in his voice. Always deflecting with humor.

“This is not a joke, Landon. You could have died!”

“I _did_ die, Hope. And…I came back different. I feel different. I don’t feel like a phoenix anymore. Which is good; if I’m no longer immortal, that means we can kill my father.”

“Why are you acting so blasé about this?” I replied, angrily.

“You. You taught me how to be a hero, Hope, how to do what has to be done, no matter what the cost is to me personally. This is what has to be done if we want to stop the monsters. If we want to save the school. Save the people we care about, Lizzie, Jed, MG, Kaleb, Dr Saltzman, Josie, Raf…you. This is what heroes do.” He gently stroked my forehead, delicately swiping strands of hair out of my face.

As he stood, pulling me up once again, Landon continued, “Hope Mikaelson, you were the first person to see me. No one had ever done that before; I was invisible as a person, until you walked into the Mystic Grill and ordered a Peanut Butter Blast with whipped cream on the bottom. And since that day, you’ve let me find happiness….” 

“Landon…” I started, throwing my arms around him.

“It’s OK, Hope,” he interjected, hugging me as well, trying to make me feel OK about his impending sacrifice. How could I be OK losing another person I loved? Why are the people I love always leaving me, dying on me?

But it was clear that I could not stop him. He was mortal now, unlikely to survive this battle even if he weren’t the missing piece needed to defeat Malivore. So I needed to say whatever was left for me to say. Choking down tears, I began again. “And you were first person outside my family to see me as just a girl, not a mistake, not a monster, not a monster’s daughter. You helped me open up and learn to let others in, even if only a tiny bit. Being with you felt almost normal. And for all of that, I am truly grateful. I love you, Landon Kirby….”

“…But not like that…” he interrupted, as he pulled slightly back, not breaking our arms free but putting what felt like a chasm of air between us, though in reality it was not more than a few inches.

“I thought I did…maybe I even did. When you came back into my life that night at the church in Atlanta, I thought maybe the universe was giving me something in exchange for all I had lost. I even thought we were going to be epic…”

“The world’s last phoenix and the world’s first tribrid? And all the things we’ve been through these past few years? There’s no way that’s not epic, Hope! I don’t regret a single second of my time with you. You helped me find my mother and figure out who I am. You helped me discover my purpose and taught me how to be a hero. I don’t regret a single thing…. Except maybe running off and leaving both you and Josie…. That was bad form,” he chuckled.

“Promise me, Hope,” Landon continued, “that you will pursue your own happiness with the same fervor that you protect those you care about. Promise me that you’ll do it now and not wait until ‘things go back to normal,’ because”—he made a circling motion with his hand—“people like us don’t have the luxury of a human normal. I know you will never stop looking after your friends, and Josie, but promise me you will look after your own happiness, too. …Promise me, Hope.”

Tears were gushing from my eyes and I was choking on my sobs. I forced out the words, “I promise….”

“I’m sure that there’s a universe where we get a happy ending, Hope. Somewhere out there, the tribrid and the townie are together and happy and safe. It’s just not this universe…and that really sucks, because you are the best thing that ever happened to me. Take care of yourself, Hope. Promise me you’ll try to be happy. And look after Josie…because I care about her, too, and if I’d never taken that knife….”

“If you’d never taken that knife, none of the good things of these past two years would have happened, either. Take it from me, you don’t have enough time left in life to spend on ‘what ifs’…” I countered, before being interrupted by a great roar coming from Landon’s father, now almost close enough to grab us.

“You were always the best part of me, Hope Mikaelson,” Landon finished, punctuating his statement with one final kiss, so brief that I barely had time to register the pressure against my lips before it was gone…and he was gone. The boy I loved had picked up the golden arrow and charged Malivore, thrusting the arrow into his erstwhile father’s knee before colliding with the muddy torso, which began to absorb him just as it did Alyssa barely a few hours ago.

I tried to settle myself, push out all of my thoughts and feelings, just concentrate on what had to be done. I picked up Josie’s katana again and swiftly severed all three heads from the necks of Clarke-Cerberus, still writhing on the ground after Landon had driven the arrow through its abdomen. I kicked each head in a different direction in an attempt to forestall another resurrection; Clarke’s glassy-eyed, lifeless head I hurled at Malivore himself, where the head began sinking into the mud-monster’s chest. I started running towards Malivore, determined to end this fight before he swallowed Landon—because if he did, I had no idea what would happen; Landon was what he wanted, after all.

From somewhere in the distance, I heard a voice break though my focus. A soft, sweet voice that made me go weak at the knees, as it had so many times over the last decade. Josie.

“Don’t you dare leave me, Hope Mikaelson. That won’t make it right; it will just give us another person to mourn and miss….” I then felt her left hand on my shoulder, her right hand on mine which held the katana. “I loved Landon, too, though I know not in the way you did. He was a friend, and then, when we were together, he was filling a hole, a hole I didn’t understand until I restored everyone’s memories. I was so angry when Landon was trying to choose, not because I was jealous of you, but because I knew if he chose you, I would lose him and _still_ not be able to be with the person I truly loved.”

Josie loved me? Was I hearing those words correctly? Interpreting their implications properly? Surely this was all just some monster tormenting me, making me live through an entire gamut of emotions, trying to make me break. But the breath on my neck with every word she uttered, it felt so real, and her hand on mine felt so warm. I could feel her blood pumping through the arteries in her hand and capillaries in her fingers. Everything was a fog, trapped in slow motion. I shook my head to try and clear it, and instead of returning to the forward position, my head remained fixed on the brunette to my side. Those warm, chocolate pools holding the mysteries of the universe, taking on elements of concern, sadness, and the faintest hint of joy. “If this is real, kiss me,” I finally blurted out, irrationally.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

That soft, sincere, barely-above-a-whisper reply was followed by the gentlest caress of my lips by delicate pillows bearing hints of vanilla and oranges. I felt the world explode around me, a magical warmth consuming every part of me. I felt, for the first time in my entire life, complete. If I died right there, right now, on that spot, it all would have been worth it for that feeling.

From within the cocoon of warmth and happiness now encompassing me, I could hear Josie call out to me again, “Don’t you dare leave me, Hope Mikaelson. We both know that the story of our love is epic, and I promise you it will have a happy ending.”

With that, I felt Josie wrest the katana from my hand and drag it through the still-bloody wounds on my arms left by Cerberus, coating the blade in magical Mikaelson tribrid blood. The cold steel swiping over my wounds finally yanked me back into the moment, and my eyes came into focus to see Josie smiling at me. I could feel a smile growing across my own face, unwilled but not unwanted.

“Together,” she said, looking me in the eyes and then switching her gaze to the bloody blade in her hand. We intertwined our fingers once again, this time also grasping the hilt of the katana, and rushed at Malivore. The last thing I remembered was the look on Landon’s mud-framed face—a look of pride—and Josie’s words still echoing in my head—“We both know that the story of our love is epic, and I promise you it will have a happy ending”—as the blade pierced Landon’s heart and that of his father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well…this chapter had to do a lot of heavy lifting to try and fulfill my original intent of this story (to honor the real and true, maybe even epic, love between Hope and Landon from Season 5 of _The Originals_ and the first half-hour or so of Season 1, Episode 1 of _Legacies_ , but to move beyond that once it didn’t seem to be working anymore and acknowledge that one’s first big love is rarely it, and sometimes there’s someone better-suited hiding just under your nose)…and I’m not sure I accomplished that, so I’m sorry if I let you all down.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has read this story, given kudos, and commented along the way (especially those people who found it in the middle of the summer and left great comments that helped me get back to writing…we’re here today at the end in no small part because of y’all!); I appreciate your support so much.
> 
>  _If_ you care what’s next from me…probably a winter chapter of [Tales from the Salvatore Kitchen](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878436). I’ve also got 3 other long Hosie stories in various stages of completion, from about 1/4 to 3/4 finished (see my profile for brief details); they each have some non-linear-timeline-related constraints, so I’ll probably not start posting until they are finished or very nearly so…so no 9 month gaps between chapters again!
> 
> (How do we feel about an epilogue?)
> 
> And don’t forget: Stay Safe and Ship Hosie! :-)


	9. Epilogue: “The Very Best of Me Is in You”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re wondering why this Epilogue is chapter 9 and you don’t seem to remember having read Chapter 8…it’s because I messed up. I started putting Chapter 8 together on AO3 3 days before I finalized the text and posted…but, despite leaving myself a note(!), I forgot to update the Chapter Publication Date when posting, so it posted buried among works updated 3 days back. And then I didn’t discover the error until 2 days after that. Sorry 🙁
> 
> To make it up to you, because I had a single sentence I wanted to include but couldn’t work it into Chapter 8, and because there wasn’t much Hosie interaction in Chapter 8, I wrote an Epilogue. Enjoy!

Epilogue: “The Very Best of Me Is in You”

“Make art. Use your voice. Have adventures. And have at least one totally epic love. And be every bit of yourself, because the very best of me is in you.” —Hayley Marshall-Kenner

§

After Josie and I stabbed Landon and Malivore, the mud-man monster turned to solid clay and exploded into millions of pieces. The Malivore-bullets in the Triad commandos’ weapons turned into an acidic black goo, eating through the guns themselves before falling into steaming puddles on the ground. One by one, we all felled the other monsters present, even Kai Parker and The Necromancer. (Although what else Malivore released before being exploded, well, that’s a tale for another time.)

By some miracle, Landon was our only casualty. There were lots of wounded students, sure, but nothing super-healing, vampire blood, or a few drops of magical Mikaelson tribrid blood (as Josie affectionately began to call it) couldn’t fix right up.

All that was left of Landon was his left hand and a few scraps of flannel from his shirt; everything of him that had been absorbed already was gone with the mud. We buried those relics in the garden behind the school and planted a bed of flowers—which, we soon observed, remained in bloom throughout the year, no matter the season or the natural blooming rhythms of the flowers. One of the younger students discovered a few grains of the soil there could bring back to health even the most dire of dying plants. We had our very own magical object, born of a noble sacrifice and consecrated with spilled blood.

Rafael left the school a short time afterward, determined to spend time with his father and find his mother, to reunite his biological family after the demise of his found family. He left me Landon’s guitar—“He’d want you to have it, Hope.”

I spent a lot of that spring painting, often in the garden. Josie described it as my “black period”—how many different ways could I put black and grey on the canvas. Even Landon’s ever-blooming flowers were black on canvas. Slowly, though, color began creeping back in to my paintings, a flower here, a yellow sweater there, a hint of blue sky another place. Through it all, Josie was always there, giving me space to mourn and grieve while making sure I remembered to eat—and sleep; at least once a week she’d sneak in to check on me in the early hours of the morning and catch me tossing in bed. She’d lightly touch my shoulder, tracing the faintest of circles while siphoning, kiss me on the forehead, and whisper “ad somnum.” By mid-summer, I found myself finishing a canvas showing Landon, phoenix wings fully ablaze, descending from the sky and stabbing Cerberus with a golden arrow. Josie hung that in the foyer of the old Salvatore mansion.

Josie taught me how to play Landon’s guitar, and we eventually formed a folk duo, The Siphon & The Tribrid—though we later chose a less identifiable name for public consumption, Persephone & Eurydice. I preferred the piano, of course, but either way I accompanied her and her ukulele. Our song “The Doom of the Immortal Phoenix” actually got some radio play in the greater Virginia region, and one summer we went on tour, performing at various folk festivals around the country. I liked to paint Josie as she was songwriting, so there were dozens of little portraits stashed in our collections, too.

Lizzie continued her self-growth and decided that she was finally worthy of true and complete love _and_ was capable of returning it. She and MG began dating in the fall after the battle and have been going steady ever since, though not without the occasional bump in the road—it couldn’t be Lizzie Saltzman otherwise—but nothing that persisted longer than 24 hours. Her sharp spines had been worn down to bumps, not unlike the Appalachians around us—a defensible barrier when necessary, but passable otherwise.

And Josie…I really could go on about Josie until the end of time. She would never let me say that she was perfect…but she was perfect for me. We fit in ways that never made perfect sense, but, after all, when does love make sense? Stolen kisses between classes, before gigs, in the library, on the tour bus, when she was covered in soil and I was splattered with paint. It was young love…but it was more than that, too. It was deep, and solid, and lasting.

In the spring some years down the road, somehow—and no one ever fessed up—I was invited to participate in an exhibition in Paris with one of the paintings from, as Lizzie put it, “your my-sister’s-sweaters period” (Josie called it simply my “yellow period”). Lizzie and MG came with Josie and me, and we stayed with Caroline in her Second Empire apartment during the exhibition’s opening week. It was fascinating to see other young artists and their works, and such an honor to be included among them; for once in my life, I didn’t feel out-of-place.

Caroline also showed us around the city, including a few of my father’s old haunts that never make the normal tours—I got to picture him sitting at a café, sipping his espresso and reading the latest great tome. One night Josie and I went to a club we stumbled upon and someone recognized us—we had no idea Persephone & Eurydice had gone international—and they convinced the club manager to book us for a set later in the week before we returned to Mystic Falls.

These were the kind of adventures I enjoyed having, that I yearned to have fill my life instead of the (mis)adventures fighting villains and monsters that it had been filled with for so long.

On our last day in Paris, the five of us took one of the famed _bateaux-mouches_ down the Seine; Caroline had “somehow” wrangled a private cruise. At sunset, near the Eiffel Tower, Josie dropped to one knee and asked me to marry her…“Hope Andrea Mikaelson, will you be my always and forever?”

§

I said “yes,” of course; what kind of fool do you take me to be if you thought otherwise?

I think back to my mother’s last words to me: “Make art. Use your voice. Have adventures. And have at least one totally epic love. And be every bit of yourself, because the very best of me is in you.” I had a rocky start on it, for sure, and there’s still a long road in life ahead of me, but I think over the past several years I’ve succeeded in heeding her advice and honoring her wishes. And I’ve been _happy_ , impossible-for-Mikaelsons happy—unconditionally happy. Maybe my father only having one epic love in his thousand-year life left room for me to have a second chance at one? Whatever the story, I’m making the most of my chance, and I know the very best of me is in that love, our love, the love I sealed with kiss at sunset on a boat on the Seine with Josie Saltzman.

FIN.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The Doom of the Immortal Phoenix” is inspired by Gordon Lightfoot’s famous, haunting [“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI) I started developing lyrics but decided I’d never get more than a verse easily and my time was probably better spent writing story instead, so go listen to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and just picture two twenty-something American women singing about a doomed firebird instead of a Canadian guy singing about a doomed freighter.
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed; thank you again for reading and for all your support along the way 🙏
> 
> Remember: Stay Safe and Ship Hosie.


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